Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Day 1375 - Dashing madly across Australia in search of a job.
Tuesday February 23rd
I shaved at my Iraqi barber’s, I bought cream cheese and bread and tins of all sorts, I caught tram 86 and suddenly felt the urge to take the train out of Melbourne instead of hitching. I love trains. So I didn’t get off at Elizabeth Street to catch tram 57 heading west, instead I stayed on the tram until Southern Cross station and got on the next train to Ballarat - a “football special” train full of people wearing colours possibly associated with Geelong’s team - for the, for me, astronomical sum of 10 dollars. I didn’t have much more than 100 dollars left in my pocket.
The train rocked along, Victorian countryside lit by a setting sun rushed past, I started reading Ian Rankin’s thriller Watchman. It’s about time; Stian gave it to me back in Indonesia.
Almost two hours later I arrived in Ballarat. Loaded like a pack animal, I was the last person to leave the station and enter the adjoining bus terminal. A man wearing an orange reflective vest approached me and wondered where I was going. It was obviously his job to make sure people got where they wanted to go. “I don’t really know,” was my first response to his question. But I had memorised the google map, more or less, before leaving Melbourne. “I think I want to hitchhike to... Ararat?” I said. “That bus is going to Ararat,” he said, pointing, “and it’s leaving right now – do you want to be on it?” He was direct but friendly. “Ooh, I don’t know, how much is it?” I said. “About 8 dollars,” he said. “Ah, that’s too much for me... I’m heading west looking for work,” I explained. “Well, I’M working,” he said, took out his wallet, opened it and handed me a 10 dollar note. “Run inside to the ticket office and buy yourself a ticket,” he said. It really was his job to make sure every customer got where they wanted to go. I would normally have declined his kind offer, like Peter’s in Christchurch. But he was dead serious. And I thought... well, that’s his choice. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t want to. I thanked him profusely, grabbed the note, got my ticket, gave him the change plus a few more coins out of my own pocket and got on the bus. He waved me off as if it was no big deal what he’d just done.
His incredible kindness was offset by the woman at the station in Ararat. I was going to walk out of Ararat in the night and find somewhere to pitch my tent, but as I arrived at the small bus terminal / train station and the whole place was full of benches and devoid of people, I decided to crash right there on the platform. It was a pretty cold night, already very different to Melbourne, and I was woken every hour by an earthquake of an express train passing through, and at 6am by the overzealous woman, perhaps the station master. “Time to get a move on,” was how she woke me up. I’d spread myself out on a bench with my mattress and blanket, but my bags were tidy and stowed away under the bench. And there was not another soul in sight. I sat up almost immediately and packed up my stuff, and then discovered that the warm waiting room had been unlocked. I went there to warm up and to have my breakfast. I got my bowl and spoon out, mixed up some water and condensed milk and added honey and rolled oats. The woman appeared again. “I think you are taking liberties,” she exclaimed. “Isn’t this a waiting room?” I asked, perplexed. “Yes, but people don’t normally have their breakfasts in here,” she said, huffing and puffing. Yes, imagine that. Somebody eating their breakfast in a waiting room. What a liberty. There should be laws against things like that. I considered getting naked and climbing the nearest tree but instead settled for finishing my breakfast, brushing my teeth in the sink and walking off without making any special efforts to say goodbye.
I walked through the still sleeping little country-town, smacking just a bit of the Wild West, and found my hitchhiking spot under a brown tourist sign saying something about the scenic drive through the Grampians. The main road between Melbourne and Adelaide, the A8, passes just north of this little mountainous area; I’d decided to make the trip to Adelaide more interesting by passing through this national park instead.
I remember writing a hitchhiking-recipe right at the beginning of this journey. Please forget all that. There is only one rule you need to know in order to be the most effective hitchhiker ever. Make a sign saying “I HAVE CHOCOLATE”. That way you only need one sign. I’d just finished my sign when Chris pulled over, though it wasn’t because of the chocolate. He actually doesn’t like chocolate, which was a bit disappointing. Instead, being in charge of promoting tourism for the region, he was very interested in backpackers. I told him that I am at the extreme end of backpacking and probably not a very useful yardstick to go by. He told me how he’d done what I was doing many decades ago – he travelled to Perth on eight cans of baked beans looking for work. He eventually ended up in the (Northern) Territory working with Aborigines for many, many years.
When we arrived in Hall’s Gap, the main tourist drag on the doorstep to the mountains, I followed Chris’ advice and went with him to where he works, left my stuff in his car and paid a quick visit to the Aboriginal Cultural Centre after a quick mouth harp concert for three unimpressed kangaroos, presumably a mother and two young ones, out for a morning feed and skip through the bush. They were polite enough to stop and listen, four or five metres away, for a couple of minutes but they didn’t have any spare change in their pockets.
The cultural centre was really quite good, there was no mincing of words. It tells the story of how the Grampians have been inhabited by Indigenous Australians for tens of thousands of years until they were slaughtered, dispossessed, evicted and enslaved in a systematic, government-approved genocide of people and culture by the invading Europeans. You don’t hear such things very often down in Victoria; Aborigines and Aboriginal culture has virtually disappeared unless you specifically seek them out.
Chris dropped me back at the junction and it took a good half hour before anyone hungry for chocolate went up the quiet road into the mountains. A Mexicans man and woman in a 4WD with “Monash University” printed on it dropped by the ambulant chocolateria. On the menu were choc chip cookies, 75% dark chocolate from Kim, a box of mixed Cadbury’s Celebrations mini chocolates from Jennifer and the chocolate bars from the CS chocolate picnic. The Grampians provided steep bends, vertical escarpments and views of distant lakes, and although it was a welcome relief from the flatness of Victoria it must be said that any little mound in Australia seems to qualify as a tourist attraction. The Mexicans were there to study ants – specifically their symbiotic relationship with a certain plant - and dropped me at the turn-off to a dirt track probably crawling with ants.
The car behind us, driven by an elderly Australian couple, probably thought we had broken down and stopped to help. They felt obliged to bring me along but were clearly a bit nervous about having a complete stranger in their car. And they were only going to McKenzie Falls a few kilometres down the road...? Oh, waterfalls, great idea... could I come?
I skipped down to the bottom of the gorge to appreciate the vertical waterfall from below. The landscape, terrain, dryness, red rocks and scattered eucalypts reminded me very much of the opposite end of this vast country – it could have been Edith Falls or Katherine Gorge. Walking back to the main road, I held my thumb out. Even without promises of chocolate, Germans Thomas and Carolin pulled over in their van closely followed by another car with their Dutch / German companions Thomas and Diana. Like so many others they’d bought vehicles upon their arrival in Australia. They were actually aiming for Adelaide too but they were in no hurry and were going to take several detours and make plenty of stops. I said I was in a little bit of a hurry but I’d come along for the ride for a while and see how it goes. About 24 hours later they dropped me off in Bordertown just across the state border in South Australia. Which meant that my progress had been less than impressive. But it also meant that I’d experienced two Aboriginal art sites in the Grampians, tens of thousands of years old but the stick-men and hand prints are incomparable to the much more elaborate paintings I’d seen in Katherine Gorge; Victoria’s “little Ayer’s Rock”, labelled as such in a desperate attempt to pull in the tourists but a nice enough escarpment hovering above eucalypt-dotted farmland of its own; an uneventful drive through the Little Desert National Park; a massive curried veggie dinner at the rest area on the Victorian side of the border as my German-Dutch travelling companions had to get rid of all their vegetables before crossing over to South Australia because of the fruit fly quarantine zone; and plenty of goon (box wine) over a game of yatzee in which I absolutely trashed the feeble Germanic opposition. The night in my tent was of varied success, I awoke freezing at 5 and boiling at 10, that’s Australia, but I was tired enough to sleep through the rumble of passing road trains. It was at least a legal night’s sleep; all credit to Australia for providing rest areas along highways where free camping is allowed.
I was very tired after a rough weekend and they slept in too. We crossed the border and split up in the first town in South Australia, the appropriately named Bordertown, at noon. Border towns can sometimes be funky places, this one was just full of farming machines and utes. And the hitchhiking sucked. I was stuck on the highway with traffic passing by at 110 kph, not ideal. The hours passed and I began to wonder if I would ever make it to Adelaide. It was already Tuesday and I had to hurry up to get my job before the end of the week. I also began to regret that I didn’t follow the German-Dutch convoy down to the coast to see 90 Mile Beach and the infamous, enormous lobster that decorates the seafood restaurant down there. Just to hammer the point through.
But then Pierre turned up. Another dude on a one year working holiday with a van purchased for way too much money. He’d tried his luck at pear picking without much of a financial reward. To make money from fruit picking in Australia it seems like you have to be extremely motivated and turn up weeks before the harvesting starts to secure a job and then spend a week or two learning the tricks of the trade. Only then will you start to save money. That takes a lot of time; time is what I don’t have; Pierre’s fruit picking-stories made me even happier about my decision to head west. So was Pierre when he’d tasted my chocolate. Pierre is from Champagne in France – incidentally most people around the world don’t know that Champagne is a region and not just a bubbly drink.
We went straight west on the A8, crossed the Murray river, climbed up and down the Adelaide Hills, through the suburbs and parks and into the city centre, thereby probably making it into my Hitchhiker’s Hall of Fame though I need to make some calculations. Pierre had never been to Adelaide before so I directed him to the place with three hostels right next to each other. The first person I bumped into on the pavement was Sam from Burundi, I’d met him there at the hostel almost six months ago! I remembered him specifically because of the story he told me when I asked him if he was from Ethiopia, because of his, to my mind, typically Ethiopian looks. No, he is a Tutsi (or a Hutu if I remember incorrectly), and he told me the legend of how an early Christian tribe had passed down the Nile and split up at modern-day Khartoum. One group followed the Blue Nile to its source in Ethiopia to become the highland Ethiopians we know today, the other group followed the White Nile to its ultimate source in Burundi where they found a land they wanted to call home and settled down relatively peacefully next to the Hutus who already lived there, until some Belgians came along and screwed it all up... That’s why Tutsis look like Ethiopians. Or so the story goes.
It was 5pm and I was tempted to spend the night to celebrate Sam’s birthday. But it was almost the end of the Tuesday and I just had to press on. I ran over to the supermarket to pick up more bread, tomatoes and bananas, jumped on the free tram through the centre, then a local bus heading north out of town along the A1 in the direction of Port Augusta, and by the time I’d had my cream cheese-salted tomato-cheddar cheese-baguette dinner on the pavement I had exactly ten minutes left to hitchhike before the sun passed below the horizon. Ouch. The sun set, it got cold, I put on more clothes and continued to hitchhike. I was too close to the city. The noise of go-carts whizzing past, incessantly buzzing like flies, lap after lap after lap, emanated from the track next to me. I started looking around for a place to crash for the night, a next door warehouse seemed to provide nooks and crannies to hide away in. Just when I was about to call it a night, not long before 10pm, a van pulled over. Kelton, one of the go-cart attendants, had watched and pitied me all night. He gave me the full low-down on all intricacies related to go-carting in the 20 minutes it took him to reach the petrol station nearest to his exit.
“Heading north?” I asked the first person I spotted at the petrol station. The slightly elderly guy nodded. “Got room for one more?” I tried. He was far from sure about it but he found it too hard to turn me down. I jumped in and made sure he didn’t regret spending 40km with me. My bags went in the back with his mops; Trevor is a cleaner at an Adelaide school for ‘mentally disadvantaged children’ or, as Trevor endearingly but ever so politically incorrectly put it, ‘spastics’.
Now I’m in my tent on the lawn outside a small petrol station, closed at night, 20 metres from the road. It’s just gone 1am, there’s no one around. The petrol station, pub and three houses are collectively known as Lower Light which sounds like a suggestion to passing cars, but it is instead a reference to the nearby river, the Light. It’s the sort of place they might come at me with a shotgun so when I saw a woman leaving a house I ran over to introduce myself and to ask where I could pitch my tent. She was ok with it, let’s hope the rest of them are too in the morning. I will hopefully get up before them.
Tomorrow I hope to make the 250km to Port Augusta before noon, then drop by the library for some internet and to hopefully print a few copies of my CV, before heading out and turning west. That’s when the real job hunting begins...
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Phil drives his small truck between Port Wakefield and Adelaide twice every day. He collects scrap metal from people’s back gardens for free and then sells it at 500 dollars per truck load, making him a neat 1000 dollars per day. The scrap metal was replaced with a Norwegian on his way back to Port Wakefield. Phil looked like a biker and spoke like a biker. His dream is to cross the US on his bike and check out the best blues in the world in Nashville, Tennessee.
I chucked my bags out of his truck at a petrol station. They landed right in front of the wheel of Gary’s trailer carrying his boat. He was just about to head off, “I’m going to run over your bags,” he said, jokingly. “Sorry,” I said, and then tried my luck: “Heading north by any chance?” And the rest is history. History of a convoy of three cars with an extended family and two dogs on their way to a holiday home on the Eyre Peninsula. Gary was another interesting Australian who’d worked a lot with Aborigines but was now constructing power-lines.
Gary definitely crossed the 200km threshold for inclusion in my Hitchhiker’s Hall of Fame though I’m not sure in which position. Gary was interested and 200km was more than enough to tell a very long story of a robbery in Marseille, a music video in Morocco, the Sahara and the Eye of Africa, female genital cutting in Mali, a truck accident in the Congo, an Australian girl dying rafting the Zambezi (a story he’d heard of), safaris in Zambia and Kenya, stories of anything other than hunger from Ethiopia, north Sudanese hospitality, Middle Eastern friendliness, West Bank adventures, Iranian girls, Pakistani mountains, Indian scooter rides, South East Asian annoyances, Indonesian volcanoes, East Timorese botched boat trips and New Zealand rainbow gatherings. And Gary, two dogs, a boat and a Norwegian travelling to Port Augusta.
The library in Port Augusta, where Gary dropped me, gave me not only free internet (probably for the last time in a long, long while) but also cheap printing so that I could bring along a few copies of my CV. I had lunch in a park on a brilliantly sunny and hot day and then dropped by what is probably the last “cheap” supermarket before Perth to stock up on essentials. I walked out of the centre and back towards the road when I stumbled upon a hidden treasure – a beach (where an Italian told me he’d slept without being bothered), a river to swim in, a toilet and a shower. I hadn’t washed since my shower at Lars’ in Melbourne. I swam and washed and changed my clothes and realised it had been a waste of time by the time I’d carried my heavy load across the bridge, through town and just past the junction where the road from Darwin came down... I was aching, sweating and swearing.
Friday February 26th
The good news is that I am in Norseman much sooner than I expected thanks to a record-breaking ride from Port Augusta. The bad news is that I don’t have a job.
Let’s see if they need a Norseman here in Norseman. It’s the first real Western Australian town after the endless emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain. No, the Vikings didn’t make it down here; the small town got its name from the horse that miraculously carried the first pioneer across the plain from the east. Why the horse was called Norseman remains a mystery.
I’m at a picnic table at the petrol station / roadhouse waiting for the manager to turn up, it’s dead early in the morning. I don’t think there’s going to be anything for me here because, unlike all the places along the plain since Ceduna in South Australia, there’s a local population here that’s bound to get all the work before an outsider would. Still, I’ll give it a go. It’s almost the end of the week and I’m going to need a bit of luck for my projection to manifest. After Norseman I’ll head inland to the mining town Kalgoorlie before turning west to Perth where I’ll probably arrive on Saturday for some busking before turning north along the coast to continue the hunt for a roadhouse-type establishment.
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I’ve forgotten the name of the guy from Whyalla who got me about 30km out of Port Augusta and dropped me at the junction where the Eyre Highway starts and heads inland across the top of the Eyre Peninsula. But Dale was unforgettable. I’d been stuck at that desolate junction for a couple of hours, the only sign of life being about six passing cars, seven passing road trains, 7000 flies, and one guy coming the other way asking if I wanted to buy his last 20 dollars’ worth of marijuana – he’d just driven from Perth in search of work, without luck, and he was getting a bit desperate. I put my sarong on my head to keep out the sun and wind, flies and drug-dealers. It was getting close to five in the arvo and my hopes of getting anywhere were dwindling. When would I reach Perth, two weeks from now? In two weeks I’ll probably be hungry.
But then Dale rode in like a knight in shining armour in his Toyota Hilux-style 4WD, heading for Perth. He looks just like Mel Gibson and has the same dangerous edge to him, the same sideways glace, the same lines on his face and the same energy. His cabin and ute were full of stuff, his accent was thick and his ways a bit rough. The thought of NOT getting in passed quickly through my mind; although I generally feel very safe it’s also true that rural Australia is full of redneck weirdoes. I think I could sense that the same thought passed through his mind for the briefest of moments. Both parties have to make a judgement very quickly, of course.
I got in and I quickly discovered what a special guy Dale really is. And it was clear that he enjoyed my company too. The original plan was that I would come along with him until we arrived at a suitable roadhouse, I would then get off to ask for work, hitch to the next roadhouse, get off and ask again, try to get another ride, and so on. In the end Dale insisted to take me all the way and he was happy to stop and wait at every bloody roadhouse for as long as I wanted even if he was in a bit of a hurry. Incredible. As he ended up taking me all the way to Norseman, that gives Dale unquestionably and perhaps unbeatably the top spot in my Hitchhiker’s Hall of Fame with something like 1650 km!!
Now about 50, Dale grew up near Byron Bay and was lucky enough to see Bob Marley live there in the 70s. He is a “horsewhisperer”, he breaks the horses for riding, he has a black belt in karate, he has a grown son and daughter and a Dutch ex in Perth, he has an alternative edge to him, there’s a bit of a hippie deep inside. Like me, I think, he has a perplexing mix of deep calm and edgy insecurity, and like me, I know, he’s had it up to his neck with women though we haven’t entirely given up hope.
Dale, like me, is pretty desperate. He’s just about got the money for fuel. His car isn’t insured or registered and the fines because of it are overflowing out of his ashtray. He’s trying to make it to Perth on nothing but weetabix (which is a little bit more original than Chris’ baked beans) to pick up his son and then find them both pear-picking work south of Perth. I immediately knew what part I was going to play - in the next two days Dale didn’t have to eat a single piece of weetabix. Instead we ate our way through my apples, bananas, cream cheese, honey, choc chip cookies, peanuts, doughnuts, biscuits, bread and strawberry jam. And chocolate of many melted kinds.
The top of the Eyre Peninsula wasn’t quite as desolate as I’d thought. The road followed bone dry farmlands as far as Ceduna, the last real town before Norseman 1180 km to the west. We drove through dry but forested plains and low hills, into the night, through the odd little town here and there. One of them sported a statue of a giant bird outside a pub, like the lobster. If there’s no reason for tourists to visit your town, make a reason, right? Dale explained it with a Quote of the Day:
- Australians have a bit of a thing for... er... big things.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
We stopped at the first rest area after Ceduna for a snooze. Dale in the car, me in my tent. We slept a bit late and we were only off at 8am after a quick breakfast. It was going to be an exceptionally long day – we followed the sun, giving us more daylight hours, and we crossed two time zones, putting our clocks back by a total of 2.5 hours. So we just kept on driving.
There were no more towns so every roadhouse out here is absolutely dependent on imported labour. I started dropping by one after another, most were friendly and appreciated the call, some were rough and grumpy, one, the Mundrabilla roadhouse, was a very close shave but they’d just hired a Norwegian girl who would be turning up in a couple of days. The end result, after probably ten roadhouses – nothing. I’m just beginning to lose a bit of faith.
A road sign indicated the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain. “Nullarbor” is shortened Latin for “no trees”; the Aboriginal name for the plain translates as “no water”. Yes, it’s harsh, hot, dry, flat, monotonous, with vegetation mostly below a foot high. But neither is it pure desert, there’s always some green-brown bush clinging on out there. And the occasional tree. There’s not much out there yet there’s plenty of poetry in the gentle undulations of the road, the distant horizon, the mirages and endless dots of low scrubs.
Best of all – the southern coast of Australia curves upwards in what they call the Bight and at one point runs alongside the road. We made a couple of turn-offs to the 90 metre high vertical cliffs that block the path of the onslaught of the Southern Ocean. Wild, desolate beauty. So perpendicularly different to the flatness of the interior, so unexpectedly dramatic compared to the boredom of everything else. So far from anywhere. Perhaps that is why the Southern Right Whale drops by this bay every year around May-July on their annual breeding stop-over. These cliffs are apparently some of the best in the world to spot whales from. Perhaps I’ll be lucky on my way back to Melbourne?
Right on the edge of the cliff was a pair of sandals. Big, brown leather ones with a perfect safety buffer for my toes. A bit worse for wear but perfect for me, I could have bought them myself. But could I take them? There was no one else around? What were they doing there right on the edge? It was as if they were pointing to the ocean. Had somebody jumped in barefoot to end it all? What a perfect place to do so. Or perhaps it had been an accident. Or was it just a joke? I didn’t care. I’d been waiting for this moment for a while now, my unmatching pair from Laos / Thailand are full of holes and falling to pieces. They’ve ended up in a bin at the roadhouse here in Norseman.
I took over the steering wheel from Dale and continued in the direction of Western Australia. The cliffs along the coast died out and were replaced by sloping hills and a few sand dunes. It reminded me so much of the Western Sahara coastline.
We kept driving west accompanied by the eclectic tunes from the second-hand tapes Dale had picked up for 10 cents each before he set out from Newcastle (just north of Sydney); there was Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Joni Mitchell, The Doors and Songs of the Humpback Whale. We reached Border Village where the car was searched more thoroughly than when you enter Australia; we’d finished all our fruit and veg in time for the next “fruit fly quarantine zone”. In Western Australia we dropped by more roadhouses and the distance between them increased. It was quite fitting that we were on the longest straight bit of road in Australia when we drove into the sunset. That’s 146.6km without a single bend, no kidding. Australia is epic.
The roadhouse in Balladonia were apparently coming into their “quiet season” and sent me packing. Dale and I got too tired and had to stop at the next rest area. Dale’s legs were hurting, I gave him my tent to stretch out in, I curled up in a car seat and slept like a baby until we were suddenly back on the road at 5am with Dale behind the wheel, me slowly waking up. We reached Norseman at just after 6am and said goodbye for a very long time, testament to the good time we’d had together. Dale is sadly doing the last 700-800km to Perth without me and I’m probably going to be stuck looking for another lift to Perth, anyway...
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15 minutes later
I’m in the restaurant at the Norseman roadhouse, after handing over my CV I was asked by the manager to have a seat and wait for a while. They might have an opening for a “console operator”, meaning the person behind the till who presses buttons to make the petrol pumps work, etc. “Are you computer literate?” was one of the questions she asked me to which I’ve answered that I build the things myself. Which is not a lie, I built the PC that was at the heart of my recording studio Otherwise Studios in London. I thought I’d bring out my laptop here at the restaurant just to make a point out of my computer literacy while the manager is making phone calls. So here I am, pretending to have lot of important computer business to get on with... la la la... blah blah blah... Would be great to work here, I think, there’s going to be a lot more action in Norseman than at one of the isolated roadhouses. And, come on, isn’t it just meant to be? I mean... Norseman! Few people in the world look more like a Norseman than I do. Blah blah blah... la di da la di da... it’s probably a good sign that it’s taking so long. Ah, perfect, the manager just walked past, I smiled at her and she definitely spotted my laptop.
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A few hours later
Do they need a Norseman in Norseman? Do they? Oh the irony. I’ve travelled thousands of kilometres through dozens of towns and roadhouses and it’s in Norseman they need a Norseman. The name of a horse? Pah! I’ll give them an alternate version of the legend behind the name of this town. My face might the first the tourists see as they arrive after the long drive across the Nullarbor Plain. “Welcome to Norseman!” I’ll say. Perhaps I’ll even put on a really thick Norwegian accent. Oh the irony.
I’m ecstatic. The pay could be better, the conditions could be better, the working hours more secure, but I’m in, I’ve got a job! The manager came back after half an hour to inform me of that. She’s nice on the outside, hard as rock on the inside. Firm and fair. Pretty straight-forward. Typically Aussie, I guess. Screw up and you’re out. I have to pull out all the plugs to prove myself. I’ll be behind the counter in the shop, I’ll be authorising the use of and activate pumps at the petrol station, I’ll be taking and delivering food orders, I’ll be cleaning tables and I’ll even be behind the bar at the adjoining motel. There will be a thousand things to do and I really need to be on the ball. The manager is taking a leap of faith and I will be under a lot of scrutiny. For the benefit of readers from more socialist countries and traditions, let me explain briefly how Australia works. A temporary, casual worker has zero rights. The employer can do as they please. You’re supposed to consider yourself very lucky to have a job no matter how badly paid. There is no such thing as job security. The manager got almost offended when I started inquiring into the possibilities of a better deal for accommodation and food and internet. Of course, this job is hardly brain surgery but there’s a system to be learnt. I really can’t screw it up.
As in most roadhouses, there’s a restaurant in the petrol station and a next door motel (with a bar) run by the same people. Therefore I get special rates for food and accommodation. 14 dollars per day (built in to the salary) for a room and three meals isn’t bad at all but not that great either when you consider that some roadhouses (particularly the ones in the middle of nowhere) give you board and lodging for free. The “problem” is, I guess, that this roadhouse isn’t actually in the middle of nowhere. Pretty close but not completely. (Though it should be mentioned that Norseman is in the Shire of Dundas, which means something like “the middle of nowhere” in Norwegian. Can it be a coincidence?) Perth is only about 800km away, I think. I’ll be paid AUD 20.65 per hour plus 9% of that toward a retirement fund on top. Minus 14 dollars per day for board and lodging. Minus tax. Which, if I am lucky enough to work 8 hours per day (minus half an hour for an unpaid lunch break) for five days one week and six days the next, should leave me with about AUD 3000 per month of pure profit with no other expenses. I shouldn’t have to spend a penny while I’m here other than on a bit of washing powder, some soap and shampoo. So if I work here for two months I’ll take away 6000 dollars, which isn’t bad. Won’t get me all that far in South America but it’s a start.
“You do a good job and I’ll give you the hours,” the manager Jackie told me at the end of a little briefing. I’ll have to work my bollocks off to get those all-important hours. It’s really sad, but I need to become the favourite worker here so that I’m the one who gets given the extra work. That’s capitalism for you. From now on all aspects of my existence revolve around being liked by the manager. Which makes me a social prostitute. Which I refuse to be, of course, but I’ll have to conform to that to a certain extent. In a sense I’m now in competition with my co-workers. How awful.
I’m good to go. It’s my first few hours here and I’m already called at five o’clock to do all the paperwork and then tomorrow morning at 6am is my first day of work / training. It’s apparently going to be very busy because of a horse race in town. The black shoes from the squat and my black fisherman’s pants have been accepted as a work uniform, along with a “BP” t-shirt they’re going to give me. She hasn’t commented on my week-long stubble, I hope she won’t mind me growing my beard for a couple of months! She told me to lose all my “jewellery” except my Shiva’s Eye around my neck, which is ok, and she probably hasn’t seen my hair wrap that Cassie gave me as a present at my goodbye party in Malvern – it’s a small pleat of hair wrapped in coloured string. I’ll have to cut it off if I’m told to lose it.
I’m now in my new home. It’s a room at the motel, probably bog-standard for many Western readers, it’s luxury for me. There’s a soft double bed, two towels and even a hand-towel (ooooo), there’s a fridge (!!) and a kettle (!!) and tea and coffee and milk (!!) of which there is hopefully an unlimited supply, a couple of wardrobes and chests and a stunning brown carpet. There’s a bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower and lovely brown tiles, there’s air-con and there’s a chair on my little porch. I’ll try not to use the air-con too much but right now it’s difficult not to, it’s a scorcher. It’s at least 40 degrees out there. Most importantly, there’s a big desk for my laptop and a TV built into the wall right next to it – it’s almost as if they knew I was going to do video editing here. If I can magically find the right cable I can actually output the video from my laptop to the TV which will make editing so much easier! Perhaps a store in town can order one for me? I’ve no idea how small the town really is, I haven’t walked down the main street yet. The roadhouse is exactly where the Eyre Highway from the Nullarbor Plain meets the road from Esperance on the south coast to the mining town of Kalgoorlie north of here, the town is south of the junction.
I’ve already unpacked all my stuff into cupboards, had several cups of tea and a light lunch, I’ve hand-washed my working gear and it’s drying around the room and I’ve unrolled my mat next to my bed (I will do some yoga and exercise!). Watchman, One Hundred Years of Solitude and, courtesy of the motel, the Holy Bible are on my bedside table and I’m actually serious about trying to read the latter. I’m scanning my laptop and all hard drives for viruses before I make another drive image of the C partition and a backup of all data... so that I am ready to start messing with video. After a shower and a little trim of various facial hairs with my scissors I’ll be as good to go as I possibly can be. I rock. There’s no other word for it. I’m already at home.
So that’s it. I have a job and a home for the next couple of months, as long as I do my job well. I was getting quite worried there for a second but my projection was manifested as planned. And it was all thanks to Dale. Without that ride and his insistence on keeping me on despite wasting his precious time, I wouldn’t have made it here in time to get the job. Indeed, they were having a problem here at the roadhouse being understaffed but the manager Jacquie and the assistant manager John had found some kind of solution to the problem in a meeting yesterday, John told me when I met him. “It’s only taken a morning for her to completely change her mind,” he told me, surprised, when I came up to him in the motel looking for my room and introducing myself. I don’t know what their plan was but I obviously turned up at exactly the right time, just before the alternate plan could come to fruition.
Alright, time to pat myself on the back, do some paper-work and then bust my balls at the roadhouse for a while. Internet here is 2 dollars for 15 minutes so there will unfortunately not be many updates to the travelogue in the next couple of weeks...
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A few hours later
This morning I woke up in a car in the bush somewhere on the Nullarbor Plain. Now I know how to run a roadhouse. Well, not entirely, of course, but to get a head start I shadowed Brit backpacker Rob, also on a working holiday visa, for three hours more than I was asked to, learning about authorising petrol pumps, taking orders, taking payment, dealing with food, locking up, making coffee (they have one of those scary coffee machines). Now it’s 9pm, I have to do more paperwork and then it’s off to bed before getting up at 5.30am. Wow, things are happening quickly. But you see... If I want lots of shifts I only have a day or two to prove myself before they make up the roster for next week! So much has happened in such a short amount of time it’s all slightly unreal. Better get some sleep, I’m sure going to need it.
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Sunday February 28th
Yup, I’m rushing ahead at lightning speed. Saturday was my first official day of work as a trainee and I’m trying to learn as fast as I possibly can so that I will be able to work shifts without supervision. Someone was looking over my shoulder most of the day but I was at times let loose on my own working the till. Whilst not brain surgery, the tills are fairly complex. It’s like learning a whole new computer system. It would be a piece of pie if it was just a matter of scanning products, but there’s so much more. There’s the petrol, there’s the hot and cold food counters and the coffee that obviously can’t be scanned, there’s numerous payment options including bizarre account systems for locals and truckies, there’s showers, phones, the internet, selling of mobile phone credit through another strange machine, then there’s refunds, regularly dropping money from the tills into the safe, opening and closing of tills, being a motel reception, and so on and so forth.
I even managed to solve a big mystery – how on earth we’d managed to sell groceries for 850000 dollars in one day!? It was because, during a transaction, the bar code of the next product registered as the quantity of the previous product. So somebody had apparently bought something like 90075757 sachets of washing powder...
I was so geared up that I even managed to go for a run after working from 6am to 2pm. Small but spread out, it took me 45 minutes to run from one end of town to the other and back around sunset. There’s a couple of cafes and a couple of churches, a Wild West-style hotel where people go to drink on Saturday night, a hardware store, a small supermarket, a roundabout with decorative tin-camels, and, crucially, a swimming pool where I might do some laps. The food at the roadhouse is alright but full of meat and grease which gives me another reason to stay active. Being able to eat as much as I want is a dangerous luxury.
Mining trucks roll constantly through town. Australia’s biggest gold mine is up the road. There’s even a mine registrar in town – if you find something interesting I suppose you can go there to legally claim a plot for yourself.
Today, Sunday, they pushed me nearly to the limit. I’ve worked a 16-hour day with a 4-hour break in the middle, from 6am to 1pm and then from 5pm to 10pm. I rocked at the till, unsupervised, through a very busy period in the morning, and then I was supposed to learn how to make sandwiches in the evening but the place just exploded with traffic and I had to do whatever I could to keep our head above the water. We were only four people to run a petrol station, shop, kitchen, restaurant, fast food joint and cafe simultaneously, at peak hour as it’s a long weekend. I worked the till, served up food, took orders for the kitchen, did dishes, made coffee and cleared and cleaned tables. And that didn’t stop them from giving me the job as a kitchen bitch to scrub all the filthy pots and pans and sweep and wash the kitchen floor. No complaints, I need all the hours I can get.
I’ve gotten the stamp of approval from the manager. According to her it’s a happy coincidence for them that I just walked in asking for a job. And, apparently, it’s amazing that I show leadership on my second day of work. Of course, I’m busting my balls for no other reason than sheer desperation and she doesn’t know that I actually couldn’t care less.
One way of being liked by your boss, especially in a hospitality-related job, is to always keep a damp cloth in your back pocket. That way you can quickly and easily make yourself look busy when you spot your manager coming your way. For those of you who are reacting against my cynicism, I’d like to add that I’m also doing a pretty good job and that I do not dislike my manager or any of my co-workers. There are actually some good people here. But I am more cynical than ever about what human beings have to do, what they have to sacrifice and how they have to humiliate themselves in order to get someone richer than themselves to give them money. Which I will write about and hopefully explain fully in the big upcoming anti-capitalism write-up.
I suppose my life will be rather uninteresting for the next couple of months. I don’t think I’ll be writing much about it and instead focus on more important things.
I’ve been back home for a couple of hours and I really have to go to bed – I’m back on duty in 7 hours!
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