Kalgoorlie Miner (22): Verandah - Part One

Blimey it’s hot out the front, but it’s either this or the damp, stagnant jungle out the back. Question: Flies or mosquitoes? Answer: Flies – they don’t inject piss into you. Question: Melanoma or Ross River virus? Answer: Melanoma – you can cut it out. Question: People-watching or introspection? Answer: People-watching in summer, introspection in winter. The front verandah it is.

Curse this daylight saving. I like to think I’m Progressive, but give me cooler earlier over lighter longer anyday. Sam the Stubborn Boilermaker (is there another kind?) was right about it all along. Note to self: Don’t tell him that. Can’t have my housemate saying I-told-you-so. Vote No, then feign excitement when the Yes vote wins.

Oh hello Ajax. The mighty Greek warrior. Where did you come from? Part Staffy (lazy), part Border Collie (hyperactive). Confused, like a three-toed sloth on amphetamines. Sleep in the dirt… ROUND UP FLIES… slowly lick testicles… JUMP THE FENCE AND RUN AWAY.

Bloody guitar is out of tune. Daylight saving almost certainly to blame. Excessive heating (expansion) and cooling (contraction) of strings. Top E always goes to E flat. Damn you Matt Birney.

What song should I play Ajax? Paranoid Android you reckon. Radiohead again? What did my mother say once? Mickey why can’t you play some happy songs? Like what? Like… I Love the Nightlife. Most I’ve ever laughed. OK, I’m in tune boy. Let’s go.

“Please can you stop the noise I’m tryin’ to get some rest…”

Vegetable garden is looking miserable. Corn and beans stunted, tomato yield down. Can’t even spare any to throw at the phonebox. Last season an old granny came to see the corn. Talk of the retirement village, or so she reckoned. Not so this year. Where are you random grandma? Improvements must be made. Note to self: Conduct bankable feasibility study into garden expansion, plus acquisition of a Chinaman’s hat and team of buffalo.

“Ambition makes you look pretty ugly…”

Little bottlebrushes are improving. Straight, dignified and independent. Had to untie them from their stakes because they weren’t progressing. Sink or swim, I said. Now or never. Like a mum sending her babies off to pre-school. In the first days they drooped like overworked gigolos. Had to resist the urge to interfere. So proud they’ve come good.

“Raaaiiin down, rain down, c’mon raaaiiin down on me…”

Ah, another recycler emptying their little yellow bin into the big yellow bin. Every day a reminder that people care. As Kevin Costner said in Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. As I say to a right-leaning friend of mine: It’s global warming, it’s David Hicks, it’s recycling… it’s just the vibe.

“God loves his children, yeah!”

Get off me you stinky mongrel. Rolling in dead kangaroos again. You can take the dog out of Kambalda, but you can’t take Kambalda out of the dog.

Next week: Ajax's perspective.

Kalgoorlie Miner (21): Western Australia

I'm sick of Western Australia’s resources boom – in fact if I hear about it again, I tell you I shall spontaneously combust. Resources boom, resources boom, resources boom. Feeling uncomfortably hot. China, India, uranium. Ouch, it burns!

Sure, high commodity prices are putting the wine and goat’s cheese on my table, but I am beginning to resent all of these economic refugees coming into WA from other states to snaffle a piece of our pie. “My pie!” I cry, my face crinkled up and my lower lip protruding; and your pie too, my learned reader.

These eastern seaboard vultures covet our womenfolk, refuse to adopt Western Australian values and have the gall to prattle on about the superiority of their homelands. They mock us because we speak slowly and use two syllables to say beer like “beeya”, here like “heeya” and fear like “feeya”. Ooh, the nerve – I’ll show them feeya! Listen up now as I give them all a frightful literary spanking – take this, inferior scoundrels!

Queensland is only the second-biggest state. It’s full of lanky ginger-nuts who like to cover their ruddy, freckly faces with zinc and go surf-lifesaving with their bathers wedged between their buttock cheeks. They pronounce "pool" like "poo" but with an "l" on the end. They tackle, bludgeon and stab animals for fun, all the while rhythmically guffawing like a bunch of lobotomised Dr. Hibberts. Intolerable simpletons!

New South Wales bears no resemblance to the south of Wales. It’s people have spray-on tans, artificially-whitened teeth and those gym-formed Ken (of "Barbie and Ken" fame) muscles that have no practical value around the house or workplace – they’re just for show! They like shiny things and pastel colours and they cry easily. Pansies!

Victoria is cold and pointless. Why does it exist? There’s no industry. It’s bohemian residents just lounge about in trendy (read small) cafes, sipping mocha frappucinos and reading Franz Kafka essays or The Weekend Australian. They wear black-rimmed spectacles – even though their eyesight is fine – and produce art-house films that romanticise heroin addiction. Poseurs!

Tasmania is a rude shape and it’s inhabitants are strange. Jim Morrison once reasoned that "people are strange when you're a stranger" but he never visited Queenstown, where the people are strange even if you are Sigmund Bloody Freud. My brother and I spotted that banjo-playin' yokel from Deliverance there once. I tried to make a quick getaway, but was slowed by the tricky foot-operated handbrake in our rental Tarago. The boy almost got us. The horror!

South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are... Sorry – I’ve got nothing. Nothing good, nothing bad. A blank. These places are black holes in the universe that is one’s mind!

The Northern Territory is OK with me, except for the crocodiles and poisonous jellyfish in the water – that’s just plain silly.

There is no doubt that Western Australia is the greatest state. We don’t build hideous monuments because our natural wonders are infinite; our arts scene is lagging only because it’s too pleasant outside to bother painting or sculpting or writing in some dampened studio; we are annoyingly casual because with a population density of one person per square kilometre, there’s really no need to stress; and Sunday trading won’t come in because we damn well don’t want it to.

It’s high time we seceded from the rest of Australia. It will be a glorious and, at times, bloody revolt led by me, your Supreme Commander. I‘ve already done the hard part and gained control over the media – I ordered the editors to call this column “WA: The Mighty State” and they did. Now grab your pitchforks and meet me at the border – I’ll go first, you follow!

I’ll just kick back and have another beer first though…

Kalgoorlie Miner (20): Bali

START OF PLAY.

(A hotel pool in Bali, June 2003. People variously reclined on banana lounges, skylarking in the water, or face down on massage tables. A no-doubt pirated copy of The Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication" is on repeat. MICHAEL dives in, surfacing at the barstools.)

MICHAEL: (softly addressing the barman) One Strawberry Daiquiri please.

BRAIN: (mocking) Have a look at you – swanning about ordering cocktails like you’re flamin’ James Bond. And speak louder you idiot.

BARMAN: (clipped English) No worry Aussie mate, which room you in?

MICHAEL: (yells) Number nine.

BRAIN: (hypnotised) Number nine, number nine, number nine. Revolution 9 – The White Album. What is that song about?

MICHAEL: (staring vacantly into water, whispers) I really don't know.

(LES, a leathery, greying, well-fed Australian, takes up an aquatic perch adjacent to, but unseen by Michael)

BRAIN: (excited) Hey if you stare at the ripple-sunlight interaction on the pool floor for long enough it begins to resemble a troupe of frolicking Chinese dragons!

MICHAEL: (with growing enthusiasm) Hey yeah – and they're dancing in time with Scar Tissue!

LES: (friendly, inquisitive) Scar tissue? You talking to me mate?

MICHAEL: (startled) What? Who? Oh. (reddens, scratches head) Yeah sorry, that was nothing. Just mumbling to myself... ha ha ha... hmmm. (brightens) So what brings you to Bali old buddy?

LES: (leans back, broad crooked smile) The wife and I come here for three weeks every year. Look around (sweeps arm across pool) – it's paradise. Beautiful hotels and beaches, everything is so cheap, and the people are wonderful, just wonderful. So friendly!

MICHAEL: (with lacklustre enthusiasm) Wow yeah, it sounds like you really love the joint. I've only been here a few days myself – still finding my feet I suppose (half-heartedly hops from foot-to-foot, demonstrating the finding of one's feet).

BRAIN: Bad joke. (anxious) Don't you ruin this man's contentment Michael – I know what you're thinking. (pleading) Listen to me for once. Michael!

MICHAEL: (thoughtfully frowning) See, I reckon you've got to consider this place on a deeper level. (pauses, looks around) I mean I would have a hard time describing it as paradise, strictly-speaking.

LES: (taken aback) I'm not sure what you mean.

MICHAEL: (calm) Well there's rubbish everywhere, the natural attractions are rundown, and there's, like, monkeys eating westerner's vomit off the streets. And the people...

LES: (angry) What about the people?

MICHAEL: (remains calm) Well they are generally friendly, but see it from their point of view – they need your money to survive. It's not a balanced relationship and, as such, can't really be taken on face value. They’re friendly in the way that a cotton-pickin’ Negro slave is chummy with his boss-man.

LES: (dumbfounded) That's a bit bloody cynical isn't it?

MICHAEL: (on the front foot now) Outrageously cynical, but surely you must recognise the reality of the situation. (wildly gesticulating) We spend 100 dollars on a night out, urinate on their streets, then come past in the morning and barter hard over a two dollar t-shirt. They don’t love and respect us. They tolerate us out of necessity.

LES: (paddles away, mutters) Christ you're a prick mate.

MICHAEL: (suddenly guilty) Wait Les, come back!

LES: (turns, incredulous) My name isn't Les.

BRAIN: (laughing) You called him Les because he looks like Sir Les Patterson you turkey! (reflective pause) Hey let's not come back to Bali champ.

MICHAEL: (sighs) Amen to that brother. (rejuvenated) Hey the dragons are grooving to Otherside!

END OF PLAY.

Kalgoorlie Miner (19): Kebabs

I was struggling for a column topic today (that is Wednesday) so I stepped into my pool, expelled the air from my lungs and resolved to lie face down on the bottom until I came up with something acceptable. I hoped that the silence, the zero gravity sensation and the threat of imminent death would get my creative juices flowing - and said juices did flow, my dear reader.

As I lay prone in what was potentially my watery grave, I began thinking about kebabs - not about how delicious they are, not about their potential for carrying deadly bacteria, but about the role they have played as a binding thread through the ragged quilt that is my life thus far.

Weightlessly hovering in my liquid environs, I remembered my first taste (literally) of kebabs - a job at the now-defunct Kebab Company Scarborough, next door to the Stamford Arms. I thought of the 6.00 pm to 2.30 am weekend shifts that I worked for $8 an hour; of the summer twilights spent with a pair of open burners slow-roasting my back and the setting sun in my face; of the drops of sweat that would fall into kebabs from the tip of my nose, remarkably unnoticed.

My fists mutely pounded the fibreglass as I recalled the abusive English skinheads that I tolerated without a whimper; the musclemen who would angrily insist that the yolks be removed from their eggs; the arrogant South Africans who thrived on belittling me and who's behaviour was an order of magnitude more offensive than that of any slobbering drunkard.

I grimaced an aquatic grimace as I relived the paralysis that gripped me when confronted by groups of giggling beach babes. Halfway through an involuntary bumbling parody of my kebab making routine, one of my Scarborough Football Club mates would inevitably burst in, make a crude joke about hot meat, then strut back out with the chicks in tow - to pash behind the Surf Club I supposed.

Yes, I cooly reflected from the depths, the kebab shop taught me many of life's great lessons - it made me a Labour man, it taught me to stick up for myself, and it showed me that when girls talk of men in uniforms, they speak not of a 17 year-old in a hommus-stained polo shirt.

As I relaxed and entered the "acceptance" stage of drowning, other major kebab-related life events flashed before my eyes.

My first proper girlfriend and I broke up while watching "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand", a movie which I enjoyed immensely nonetheless. I too would like to die with a felafel (my favourite kebab) in my hand... as I ride my bicycle through an electrical storm (refer to column 17).

I was eating an authentic Greek kebab as I watched Sally Robbins famously collapse and deny my sister Sarah a medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics - yes my actual certified sister was rowing in the same crew, and no she neither slapped Sally, nor smote her with an oar. As delectable as that particular kebab was, I felt obliged to spit it out in disgust.

My decision to quit Croesus Mining Norseman exploration crystallised after the 2005 local race day, while staggering around the small town in search of a kebab shop that I knew didn't exist. I had to settle for stale potato gems and a microwaved chicken roll from Caltex - that was the last straw.

It was after this thought about Norseman’s kebablessness that I, your wrinkly narrator, emerged from the pool content with my musings on the matter and ready to put pen to paper, or fingers to little buttons, as it were - a few brain cells poorer yes, but far more deeply in touch with my inner kebab.

I leave you this day with a suggestion: be nice to the people at Acropolis - friendly people get bigger kebabs.