Dear Gerard [former workmate]

How are things in the Barrick-sphere; the solemn and holy depository of geological knowledge; the impenetrable citadel of all that is known to be good and true? I know that, due to company policy, you are unable to divulge anything - not even what day it is there - but that's why letters are so great, and why I am single-handedly restoring them to power: nobody can filter them, unless you are in prison or North Korea. Fuck, shit, nigger, cunt, filthy jew, PIMA, geochemistry [those last two are a geological "in-joke"]. See?

Working out where I am - [specific description of place] in the East Kimberley - there are no rules or regulations or people watching over your shoulder. It's amazing to see what happens to a man when he is released into a world of freedom and personal responsibility, from a tightly regulated world where he is mothered and dictated to. At first there is a period of excess, in the manner of the teetotaler who leaps from the wagon, where the subject feels compelled to work in the most hazardous manner imaginable: riding on the back of utes, wearing singlets on drill rigs, walking barefoot through what the aboriginals call (adopt aboriginal accent here) "the long grass" (end aboriginal accent) - home to snakes of all descriptions.

But following the excesses - and this is where it gets interesting, and the stage I find myself in as we speak - there is a period of sobriety, to continue with the drinking analogy, where the subject reflects on the past and present and settles on a sensible middle-ground. This concept of "personal responsibility", foreign to me for so long, is a revelation, and tremendously empowering. It spreads from safety behaviour to geological behaviour to fiscal behaviour to romantic behaviour, moving through one's life like a slurp of Stone's Green Ginger Wine through the bloodstream of a man freshly emerged from his evening bath in the Dunham River.

The increased geological responsibility and empowerment are a God-send to me and, in tandem with the nagging pressure of contract work, have transformed my waning lust for rocks into a violent and unstoppable cinder cone of productivity. Where in the past I would have sat in the ute reading high-brow literature between drillholes, I now switch on the GPS, don my mapping jacket, and scale the sandstone ridges, paying heed to all I see and, if possible, measuring it's orientation with my brand new (now slightly soiled) Frieburg compass. I am doing the best geological work I have ever done...