Once upon a time, back in my student days, I was wandering out of Centrelink having collected my polony and rice money for the fortnight, when I saw a kangaroo hopping eastwards along Egan St. I watched it casually make it's way past the world's tallest bin, had a chuckle to myself, and then grinned like a Cheshire cat who just ate the cream and was about to stretch out in the summer sun.
A similar, if slightly less dramatic, event occurred only a few weeks ago when I saw a tumbleweed moseying down Roberts St on a breezy day.
Occasions like these are exciting for me because they confirm my preferred reality of Kalgoorlie-Boulder - not actual reality, but my reality.
Such events make me feel like the legendary Don Quixote de la Mancha, from Miguel de Cervantes 1605 novel "Don Quixote", who becomes obsessed by fictional knight's tales of valour, and henceforth roams the world believing that he is a mighty knight - of course in my reality I am not a knight, but rather a lovable rogue scraping through life armed only with my razor-sharp wit and trusty six-shooter.
The widely accepted "Wild West" image of the city, as inaccurate as it may be, is what brings tourists here and makes it an exciting place to live, so I don't see the point in trying to fight it - in fact I actively promote it.
I say lets tear up the bitumen roads, make saloon doors and honky-tonk pianists compulsory in pubs, and demolish houses not made from weatherboard and pressed tin. Let's have the council employ a dozen bearded ruffians to swagger up and down Hannan and Burt Streets in their underground gear, king browns of Hannan's Lager in hand, scaring tourists with threatening glares all the while.
I want visitors to regale and captivate their city-dwelling friends with stories about the perversely alluring aspects of the Goldfields that we all know and pompously pretend not to love - skimpies, bikies, and gold-stealin' miners. Let's keep the 90:10 male:female ratio myth alive just for laughs hey?
I'm certain that most of us thrive on relaying yarns (feigned disgust optional) that portray Kalgoorlie-Boulder as being rougher than a chain-smoking brothel madam. For example, when I saw a couple of bikies at the Kalgoorlie Cup this year, I made sure to point them out to visiting friends and then relay highly dramatised legends from Ora Banda and The Foundry Hotel.
Can you (yes you, the reader) tell me, without your pulse quickening or brow sweating, that you don't get any joy or chest-swelling pride out of telling such embellished half-truths about life in this city? If you reckon you don't then with utmost confidence I hereby brand you a liar and/or a wowser.
So I say let’s promote Kalgoorlie-Boulder in a way that gets people coming here, and let them be pleasantly surprised when they arrive. If travelers wanted to experience fully clothed barstaff, well planned streets and Eton manners then they would visit Canberra, and if they wanted to lounge about under a palm tree then they would surely choose a tropical Queensland island over a grubby Burt Street round-about.
I'd like to go into the Wilson Street plastic grass but that's a 500 word rant on its own.
Saturday 28 October 2006
Saturday 21 October 2006
Kalgoorlie Miner: (4) River of Knowledge
During a five week trip around India earlier this year, my mate Tim and I made it our aim to leave the country with at least a workable understanding of how Indian society functions despite the apparent randomness encountered at every turn. Broadly speaking we failed, but there were small gains made.
The central pillar of Indian craziness, the monumental cliff face from which all other madness is shed, is chronic inefficiency - pointless rubber stamping, elaborate systems of back scratching, and unnecessarily laborious work practices are commonplace.
Examples include women who are employed to hammer rockmelon-sized pieces of rock into marble-sized pieces of rock for use as road base in the Indian Himalayas, men employed to check your ticket to tourist attractions literally two metres from where you bought it, and the failure of anyone to collect rainwater in Darjeeling, where there is a water shortage despite the fact that it drizzles all day.
Of course it is a given that there will be inefficiency and seemingly menial work in a country of over one billion people, most of whom are poor, but the examples above are government-related, which led Tim and I to suspect that there was beauracratic method behind the madness.
In the end we formulated a theory that, mathematically speaking, if 'x' is the population and 'y' is the work available, then everyone simply does 'y/x' work each day. Using this (questionable) theory, if the population increases then each person does less work or, more commonly I suspect, unnecessary new jobs are created in order to keep individual work levels constant - hello zero unemployment and crippling inefficiency!
Another fascinating aspect of the Indian labour force that Tim and I noticed was the single task expertise of the street-level workers: zip-repairers, shoe-polishers, chai-makers etc. I was most impressed by the mobile phone repair men set up on many street corners with nothing but a school desk and a soldering iron - they put our woeful "send it to the east coast" electronics repair systems to shame.
This notion of a single expertise reminded of a passage from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", where Robert Pirsig says (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the river of human knowledge, which used to be deep and narrow, is now shallow and broad - only in this example we are talking about across cultures, rather than through time. Basically, through improved transport and communication technology, we in the first world have become jacks of all trades and masters of none, and therefore rarely get the satisfaction and wellbeing that comes from having a complete understanding of a particular subject or two.
The deepest part of my river is probably my work as an exploration geologist. I love the challenge of trying to gain a perfect understanding of the rocks in my area - my colleagues and I joke that to fully understand a rock, you must become the rock (an impossibly sad and unfunny joke for non-geologists I know).
So for me it's rocks, for another it's zips or brewing tea, and for others it's fast cars, stamp collecting, or miniaturised poodles. The only people I can't relate to are those without a passion - a deep river is a good river!
The central pillar of Indian craziness, the monumental cliff face from which all other madness is shed, is chronic inefficiency - pointless rubber stamping, elaborate systems of back scratching, and unnecessarily laborious work practices are commonplace.
Examples include women who are employed to hammer rockmelon-sized pieces of rock into marble-sized pieces of rock for use as road base in the Indian Himalayas, men employed to check your ticket to tourist attractions literally two metres from where you bought it, and the failure of anyone to collect rainwater in Darjeeling, where there is a water shortage despite the fact that it drizzles all day.
Of course it is a given that there will be inefficiency and seemingly menial work in a country of over one billion people, most of whom are poor, but the examples above are government-related, which led Tim and I to suspect that there was beauracratic method behind the madness.
In the end we formulated a theory that, mathematically speaking, if 'x' is the population and 'y' is the work available, then everyone simply does 'y/x' work each day. Using this (questionable) theory, if the population increases then each person does less work or, more commonly I suspect, unnecessary new jobs are created in order to keep individual work levels constant - hello zero unemployment and crippling inefficiency!
Another fascinating aspect of the Indian labour force that Tim and I noticed was the single task expertise of the street-level workers: zip-repairers, shoe-polishers, chai-makers etc. I was most impressed by the mobile phone repair men set up on many street corners with nothing but a school desk and a soldering iron - they put our woeful "send it to the east coast" electronics repair systems to shame.
This notion of a single expertise reminded of a passage from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", where Robert Pirsig says (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the river of human knowledge, which used to be deep and narrow, is now shallow and broad - only in this example we are talking about across cultures, rather than through time. Basically, through improved transport and communication technology, we in the first world have become jacks of all trades and masters of none, and therefore rarely get the satisfaction and wellbeing that comes from having a complete understanding of a particular subject or two.
The deepest part of my river is probably my work as an exploration geologist. I love the challenge of trying to gain a perfect understanding of the rocks in my area - my colleagues and I joke that to fully understand a rock, you must become the rock (an impossibly sad and unfunny joke for non-geologists I know).
So for me it's rocks, for another it's zips or brewing tea, and for others it's fast cars, stamp collecting, or miniaturised poodles. The only people I can't relate to are those without a passion - a deep river is a good river!
Saturday 14 October 2006
Kalgoorlie Miner: (3) Inside the Whale
I share my house with three other young men. In the communal toilet there is a variety of reading material including the obligatory trashy magazines (they disappear when parents come to visit), joke books and, surprisingly for some guests, assorted high-brow literature and poetry.
The odd book out is "Russian Political Institutions", a 300 page volume on the inner workings of communism. No-one knows how it got there, and no-one has ever soldiered on past the first ten pages.
Anyway, one of the toilet books is "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" by George Orwell (I just realised that it is probably bad form to have "Russian Political Institutions" alongside a book of essays by Orwell, who is best known for anti-communism novels like "Animal Farm" and "1984" - my comrades and I will rectify this). In the feature essay, the title of which is a reference to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, Orwell explains that novels generally use either passive or active characters, and does so using the whale as a metaphor for life, or the world.
Passive characters are said to be inside the whale; willing Jonahs, happy to let the whale go where it pleases, riding through life inside the protective blubber, and indifferently accepting everything that happens to themselves or others.
Active characters are outside the whale; renegade Jonahs, emotionally unprotected by the blubber, and constantly questioning and attempting to control the whale's direction.
I'll get to the point now.
I reckon that much of the western world is deeply inside the whale, far too easily ignoring or forgetting or feeling helpless against wrongs done to themselves, to others, and to the environment.
Why and how are issues like the irresponsible invasion of Iraq so effortlessly swept aside come election time, drowned amongst trivial nit-picking and competition over who has the shiniest teeth?
I think we are just so warmly cocooned inside the thick blubber of a booming global economy, that we will sit idly by while basic human rights and values disappear. We will more than happily trade the right of an Australian citizen to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, for new "rights" like having a plasma television and a boob job.
Where is the rage in the electorate? Are we plain dumb, just forgetful, or has "Big Brother" (read Orwell's "1984") successfully trampled our spirits and brainwashed into this state of permanent and disgraceful apathy? Evidence suggests all three.
One man who maintained the rage up until the day he died was Hunter S. Thompson, who most people, perhaps unfairly, think of only as the maniacal, drug-addled, gun-toting fiend who wrote "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". He certainly was all these things (and more), and was from all accounts a complete and utter bastard to deal with, but only because he never ever compromised on his values.
I urge anyone who needs an injection of rage to get a hold of Thompson's writings, in particular a compilation of his letters called "The Proud Highway" - you won't forget it. He was a man who sat defiantly on top of the whale, bottle of whiskey in hand, jerking on it's reins and flogging it until he was red in the face - we need more like him.
The odd book out is "Russian Political Institutions", a 300 page volume on the inner workings of communism. No-one knows how it got there, and no-one has ever soldiered on past the first ten pages.
Anyway, one of the toilet books is "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" by George Orwell (I just realised that it is probably bad form to have "Russian Political Institutions" alongside a book of essays by Orwell, who is best known for anti-communism novels like "Animal Farm" and "1984" - my comrades and I will rectify this). In the feature essay, the title of which is a reference to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, Orwell explains that novels generally use either passive or active characters, and does so using the whale as a metaphor for life, or the world.
Passive characters are said to be inside the whale; willing Jonahs, happy to let the whale go where it pleases, riding through life inside the protective blubber, and indifferently accepting everything that happens to themselves or others.
Active characters are outside the whale; renegade Jonahs, emotionally unprotected by the blubber, and constantly questioning and attempting to control the whale's direction.
I'll get to the point now.
I reckon that much of the western world is deeply inside the whale, far too easily ignoring or forgetting or feeling helpless against wrongs done to themselves, to others, and to the environment.
Why and how are issues like the irresponsible invasion of Iraq so effortlessly swept aside come election time, drowned amongst trivial nit-picking and competition over who has the shiniest teeth?
I think we are just so warmly cocooned inside the thick blubber of a booming global economy, that we will sit idly by while basic human rights and values disappear. We will more than happily trade the right of an Australian citizen to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, for new "rights" like having a plasma television and a boob job.
Where is the rage in the electorate? Are we plain dumb, just forgetful, or has "Big Brother" (read Orwell's "1984") successfully trampled our spirits and brainwashed into this state of permanent and disgraceful apathy? Evidence suggests all three.
One man who maintained the rage up until the day he died was Hunter S. Thompson, who most people, perhaps unfairly, think of only as the maniacal, drug-addled, gun-toting fiend who wrote "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". He certainly was all these things (and more), and was from all accounts a complete and utter bastard to deal with, but only because he never ever compromised on his values.
I urge anyone who needs an injection of rage to get a hold of Thompson's writings, in particular a compilation of his letters called "The Proud Highway" - you won't forget it. He was a man who sat defiantly on top of the whale, bottle of whiskey in hand, jerking on it's reins and flogging it until he was red in the face - we need more like him.
Saturday 7 October 2006
Kalgoorlie Miner: (2) Forest-Desert
Are you a forest person or a desert person?
I am a certified desert person, both literally and metaphorically, and this characteristic expresses itself in many aspects of my life.
From a literal point of view I am a desert person because, in simple terms, I would prefer to sit and look at a single tree on a sand plain, than to be amongst hundreds of trees in a valley. I am eternally thankful that my subconscious led me into the field of exploration geology, a profession in which my chances of encountering thick forest are slim - as long as I'm in this country anyway.
Metaphorically I am a desert person because I prefer space over clutter, simplicity over complexity, solitude over crowds.
I don't know too much about art, but I do prefer more minimalist paintings and drawings over more complex ones. I can appreciate the skill required to produce a detailed peice, but there is certainly just as great a skill in knowing what to leave out - the background noise, so to speak. There has to be space for my imagination to fill.
My preferences in music are much the same, in that I generally enjoy simple or spacious music, performed with as few instruments as possible. I love it, for example, how the White Stripes perform such unique and energetic music with only Jack on guitar and Meg on drums.
In a documentary about the making of Pink Floyd's 1972 album "Dark Side of the Moon", keyboard player Rick Wright says that he placed great importance on leaving "space" in his playing - something that he and the band did expertly on that record and on it's follow-up, "Wish You Were Here". Sometimes the space or nothingness holds in it a lot more meaning than a chord thrown in for a chord's sake.
In terms of possessions, I would rather not have "things" than have them. I like it when there is nothing around to distract my attention and I am free to explore what I can do with myself - music, writing, reading, or just thinking. When there is too much going on my brain ceases to function.
This lack-of-desire for material possessions can be quite demotivational workwise and, when coupled with my tendency to melt down when faced with complexity, potentially makes me a useless employee. Luckily, for both my boss and my loan shark, the passion for geology is just enough to drag me into work each day and keep the dollars coming in.
Finally, I reckon that this topic relates to the common misconception that country people are simple people. I think that country people just want simple things, and have the ability to think simply, so in my classification they are desert people. It's the old "nature vs nurture" debate though - are they born or made?
So anyway, what are you - forest or desert? Maybe I've simplified it too much and there is another type of person not accounted for - mountain people, swamp people? Let me know!
I am a certified desert person, both literally and metaphorically, and this characteristic expresses itself in many aspects of my life.
From a literal point of view I am a desert person because, in simple terms, I would prefer to sit and look at a single tree on a sand plain, than to be amongst hundreds of trees in a valley. I am eternally thankful that my subconscious led me into the field of exploration geology, a profession in which my chances of encountering thick forest are slim - as long as I'm in this country anyway.
Metaphorically I am a desert person because I prefer space over clutter, simplicity over complexity, solitude over crowds.
I don't know too much about art, but I do prefer more minimalist paintings and drawings over more complex ones. I can appreciate the skill required to produce a detailed peice, but there is certainly just as great a skill in knowing what to leave out - the background noise, so to speak. There has to be space for my imagination to fill.
My preferences in music are much the same, in that I generally enjoy simple or spacious music, performed with as few instruments as possible. I love it, for example, how the White Stripes perform such unique and energetic music with only Jack on guitar and Meg on drums.
In a documentary about the making of Pink Floyd's 1972 album "Dark Side of the Moon", keyboard player Rick Wright says that he placed great importance on leaving "space" in his playing - something that he and the band did expertly on that record and on it's follow-up, "Wish You Were Here". Sometimes the space or nothingness holds in it a lot more meaning than a chord thrown in for a chord's sake.
In terms of possessions, I would rather not have "things" than have them. I like it when there is nothing around to distract my attention and I am free to explore what I can do with myself - music, writing, reading, or just thinking. When there is too much going on my brain ceases to function.
This lack-of-desire for material possessions can be quite demotivational workwise and, when coupled with my tendency to melt down when faced with complexity, potentially makes me a useless employee. Luckily, for both my boss and my loan shark, the passion for geology is just enough to drag me into work each day and keep the dollars coming in.
Finally, I reckon that this topic relates to the common misconception that country people are simple people. I think that country people just want simple things, and have the ability to think simply, so in my classification they are desert people. It's the old "nature vs nurture" debate though - are they born or made?
So anyway, what are you - forest or desert? Maybe I've simplified it too much and there is another type of person not accounted for - mountain people, swamp people? Let me know!
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