Letter to The West, 14th December, 2010

In his letter headed “A pen or a shovel?” (14/12), David De Garis artfully paints himself as a noble, university educated man who toils away in the city for a wage that is dwarfed by that of poorly educated, fly-in fly-out workers in the resources industry. He asks which of the two paths a young man might follow these days.

David, like many other people not involved in the resources industry, you have drawn it very crudely, invoking visions of homogenous clusters of “workers” getting on planes to “the mines” and returning with fistfuls of cash. You draw attention to the sacrifices you made by going to university, unconscious of the fact that many people boarding such planes are either university educated themselves or are qualified tradesmen – and only a brave man would tell a tradesman that he has not also made sacrifices during his four-year apprenticeship.

So the very basis of your letter - the idea that a university education and the resources industry are mutually exclusive – is completely inaccurate. For thousands of people, including myself, “pens and shovels” are interchangeable. I have a degree and often work in the city, but I also love being hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, covered in flies, and hitting rocks with a hammer.

Regardless of their level of education or training, people in the resources industry take a risk by working in what history shows is a boom-bust game. And as a white-collar professional, I am sure you appreciate that with risk can come reward – in this case, financial. The flipside to the reward is  illustrated by events like BHP’s spectacular failure at Ravensthorpe and the subsequent mass sackings.

Finally David, all wage levels are fundamentally driven by supply and demand. If suburban white-collar wages are as pitifully low as you make out then how can anybody sensibly advocate for more people to enter these professions? I think your hypothetical young man should do exactly what he wants to do, not bow to family or social pressures to become one breed or other of white-collar worker. And if he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do, he should do what I did: become a geologist.

Letter to The West, 8th November, 2010

I often ride my bike to work in West Perth, travelling along the beautiful South Perth foreshore. While the mornings are not without charm, the return journey is the real highlight. I love to slow down a fraction, go “no hands”, and take in the magnificent skyline, the river, and the people enjoying it all.

Do you know what type of people I see most often, enjoying a riverside barbecue on a weekday evening? I’ll give you a tip: it’s not white Australians. It’s Asians and Arabs – in everything from couples, to gatherings of young people, to groups of several families. Similarly, in my local park, it is the African and Asian people who regularly gather to play gloriously big and free games of soccer or cricket.

Are these examples of the slow invasion or destruction of Australian culture about which many of this paper’s correspondents are so concerned? If so, can I say to these concerned people: embrace these sights and add them to your understanding of Australian culture, don’t fear or hate them.

Fearful correspondents should also ask themselves if they are really living the iconic lifestyle that they are so vigorously trying to protect. Because if they are, they don’t seem to be doing it within my eyeshot. In fact, I suspect that most of the more hateful anti-immigrant letters to this paper are written with pale suburban hands – not the bronzed, leathery ones of our folklore.

Finally, let us all remember that however fine it may be, our mainstream Australian culture is no great leap from its very recent European roots. Every reference to Australian culture without a deep nod to our Aboriginal people (implicitly or explicitly) is an insult to them.

Lizard stick

A poem I wrote about a favourite lizard-shaped stick - one of many! - at Peak Hill, in June 2010

Knotted mulga Lizard Stick,
‘twas only me you ever tricked,
but once you did you always played upon my memory.

I saw you every out and back,
your silhouette against the track,
on the quartz between the ruts that tortured you and me.

I liked the way your head was high,
turned back to the northern sky,
as if you’d strayed too far from home and thought you should return.

If only you had gone that way!
Cos when I passed by yesterday,
There was wood scraped up beside the track, and I tightened with concern.

That dreadful march of progress!
That tempered blade that never rests!
Some diesel demon broke you down into a heap of splinters.

To others you were just a stick;
to me your presence was the trick
that cooled down stinking summer days and warmed up solemn winters.

I didn’t mind your rigid pose:
through changing light your beauty showed.
You were the constant, grounded pivot about which things revolved.

Lizard Stick, my Uluru,
until your end I never knew,
how much a man can love a thing so simple and so old

Jesus goes to Peak Hill

Written out bush in September for the kitchen wall of the last remaining house in Peak Hill, 150 km north of Meekatharra. The house is owned by Tony Burrows, and has been in his family since 1899. Several vistors to the house have penned odes to Peak Hill. All refer to it as hell, if not directly then certainly between the lines.


When Jesus came to Peak Hill, His second time around,
He was chauffeured in a ‘Cruiser – no donkeys could be found.

It went rattle-rattle-rattle, over gully-outcrop-gully,
He said “What’s the problem driver? My back feels kinda funny.”

“We’re in Peak Hill,” the driver said, “And that’s just what it’s like.
If you’re keen I’ll cut ya clean, and lend ya my old bike.”

Jesus thought the bloke was lyin’ – pullin’ a leg or two,
So He threw a query back at him, to check his word was true:

“So in this big flat land, this pancake of a place,
You’re sayin’ there’s a little town that only billygoats could grace?”

The driver said “That’s right, but just cop it on the chin.
Muscles loose and mind at ease – don’t let Peak Hill win.”

Had broken many men, this town, or so the codger said.
The rocks, the dust, the heat, the flies: “It does things to your head.”

Jesus stewed up mighty dark, in the shakin’ shotgun seat:
“I been to Baghdad, Kabul, Meekatharra, but this one’s got me beat!”

Fed up, He got the sat phone, ‘n got right up his Padre:
“There’s two ways we can do this, Lord – the easy or the hard way.”

“Jesus Christ!” said God, “It’s ages since you called.
Now, about this Peak Hill place – I can explain the flaws.

“That first day was mighty long, designing A to Z,
‘Bout half-past-ten at night, I was craving a cup of tea.

“Then while I drank the cuppa (and, to be honest, a quiet gin),
Satan crept into the shed and carved old Peak Hill in.

“But JC, take it easy, your daddy’s got a plan,
To liven up the place, to make it rise again.”

So the bloke upstairs explained the go, while Jesus listened in,
And when the Lord was finished, the Son hung up with a grin.

“Hey driver would you like a tip, better’n greyhounds or the horses?
See me old man’s blessed a little mob called Alchemy Resources.

“So get your cash together – there’ll be copper, gold ‘n iron.
And with God as stand-in chairman, their shares will be a-flyin’

“But in place of you old characters, diggin’ out the dirt,
There’ll be a mob of useless Kiwis, in fluoro orange shirts.”

Sunday Lunch (Mapping Madness)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.