Boom! Excursions in fantasy land - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julienne van Loon
FLY-IN, FLY-OUT: MY SISTER'S HOUSE IN MCMASTERS STREET, Victoria Park is a two-bedroom double-brick place built almost a hundred years ago on a massive block. "The plan is to put two or three townhouses at the back," Lola explained when she and the family first moved in a year ago, "and then we'll fix up the main house for ourselves with a little courtyard garden at the front." At the moment, though, the backyard is an expansive dustbowl, good bathing for the family's fifteen-year-old dog, who looks decidedly miserable most of the time. The townhouse plan has not yet got to paper, mainly because a huge amount of money is tied up in a second investment property fully mortgaged up in Broome.
In the meantime, Lola makes me tea in the tiny crumbling kitchen, tacked on to the back of the house some decades ago and untouched since, bar a paint job or three.
"Do you want to go halves in a muffin?"
This is inner-suburban living, Perth style. Victoria Park is walking distance across the causeway bridge to the CBD and the home of the former premier, Geoff Gallup. According to the City of Perth website, the city is officially "Boom Capital of Australia". The council boasts that "Western Australia's domestic economy grew at 14 per cent in the June quarter 2006, higher than China's growth rate of 11.3 per cent and higher than Australia's GDP growth of 2.3 per cent". Indeed, Perth has become one of the major centres for the energy and resources industry in the Asia Pacific region. But it is also the capital of a kind of single-parent household difficult to measure using official figures.
Lola's house is one such example: it is a house run almost entirely by women. My brother-in-law works several thousand kilometres to the north and flies home for the weekend once every three or four weeks. Lola's son, aged twenty, also works away, in his case via a fly-in, fly-out arrangement at a mine north of Kalgoorlie. Lola and her teenage daughter have the house to themselves most of the time, which also means that they have more than the lion's share of the household chores and responsibilities.
Men involved in the mining industry – particularly those employed using a fly-in, fly-out rostering practice – are earning huge money, working long shifts. Out at the mines, the men are fully catered for with three meals a day and serviced accommodation. Most of the time, however, their accommodation is a single bed in a donga the size of a wardrobe. According to the latest figures, West Australian men now earn an average of $1,168 a week, which is $63 above the national average. Meanwhile, women in this state have a full-time wage which is $56 below the national average, and those with husbands working away carry the added burden of living day to day as a virtual single parent.
What interests me about the households of these long-distance commuters, however, is not so much the economics of their situation, but the emotional and psychological effects of these strange living arrangements. The dynamics of such households vary enormously, depending on whether the patriarch is present, absent, expected any moment, or just on his way out the door. Children demonstrate a kind of Jekyll and Hyde behaviour accordingly. But it is not just the women and children who are affected in the long term. Nicholas Keown, a researcher at the University of Western Australia's Rural Clinical School, conducted a study on the health of male workers in the goldfields region and is quoted in Australian Mining in August 2006 as being particularly alarmed about psychological problems among male mine workers. According to Keown, more than one in three long-distance-commute workers show symptoms of minor psychiatric problems such as anxiety, depression, substance abuse-related disorders or chronic fatigue. And who wouldn't? These are people working ten or twelve-hour revolving shifts, living in austere accommodation amongst an almost purely male population, and so far away from family and friends that their mobile phone goes completely out of range. It sounds like a kind of Siberian hard-labour camp.
I am not trying to suggest that anybody is being subjected to such situations against their will – there are, after all, vast quantities of money to be made. Last week, at my local supermarket, I listened to two mothers of young children in the line in front of me comparing notes about having their husbands working up north.
"Well, it's just the way it is, I suppose," one of them concluded. "We just have to get used to it."
"Yeah, that's it," said the other.
"Everybody knows somebody in exactly the same situation."
"Absolutely."
I HEARD A STORY RECENTLY FROM A WORKING MOTHER who lives in one of Perth's new housing estates. Sue was running late to pick up her kids from school and, as she reversed out of her driveway, she noticed a little boy of around three standing alone on the neighbour's verge. The boy looked lost and confused. Sue stopped the car and got out to ask the child if he was okay. The boy was too shy to speak. Sue didn't know what to do. She didn't recognise the boy's face as a local to the area and she was conscious that she was already running late, but it didn't feel right to leave the child. After a few minutes of one-way conversation, she coaxed the boy into her car, and drove on up the street. She thought perhaps he belonged to a neighbour she didn't know, a little further along, and that if she drove slowly he might recognise a house. Hers is a long, winding street, house after brand new house – all neat as pins – and as Sue drove along, she realised that she didn't really know any of the people in her own street.
The front yards were uniformly devoid of life. Everybody, including herself, was usually so busy with being at work, or getting on with day-today commitments, ferrying kids here and there, that they didn't have time to recognise each other, never mind stop and speak. The little boy sat beside her in the front passenger seat looking puzzled. She drove on, and wondered what people might think of her, having just put this child in her car and driven off with him. Suddenly the child's eyes widened, and Sue thought perhaps he recognised where he was. There was a particular house. She pulled up the car, and followed as the boy sped around the side through an open gate, and into a backyard where a woman was crouching down, her back curved over her gardening. The boy's mother said: "Oh, he was just here with me a minute ago," and Sue said: "Well, actually, that can't be right, because he's been with me for more than twenty minutes and it must have taken him quite some time to walk all the way up to my house."
Afterwards, it was not the boy having wandered off or the mother's negligence that bothered Sue. Rather, it was the sense of isolation – the terrible knowledge that she lived in a community of strangers. Here they all were, working madly to pay off new mortgages, and feeling safe in the knowledge that the price of real estate was increasing, they were investing in their future, and yet ... this is the street where she lives. Every house harbours a hard-working couple, and she doesn't know any of them. They don't know her. Where is the security in that? And what are they worth to any of us, really, she thought – these sparkling, half-million-dollar houses? What do they actually cost?
CODA – MIDLAND: IT'S A WEEKDAY MORNING AND I AM BACK at my local shire library in Midland. The building is a double-storey affair with a modest fiction collection and a predictably motley set of regulars who the librarians know by name and who spend long periods reading newspapers, or conducting loud nonsensical conversations with themselves as they circle the stacks, passing the time, passing the time. Public libraries suit me well, and I have done some of my best writing in them, the background muttering of slightly lost souls, coupled with the occasional high-pitched squeal of a toddler letting loose a tantrum in the children's section, permits me to observe and eavesdrop in between productive periods of hush. Today, however, I am not here to write, or even to research, so much as to get out of the house.
Writing fiction is rarely a full-time job for me. In a good week, I can manage to spend three solid half-days on my latest work-in-progress and occasionally, thanks to a break in the university calendar or an official writer's residency, I manage a stretch of a few intense weeks at a time. But lately, I have been making use of a grant from the Australia Council, and have the rare gift of a three-month stretch with which to make good headway on a new book. Yet I find myself edgy, distracted, even distraught. After a month, I am wishing for any other kind of job – any other occupation at all. I am too much inside my own head.
This morning in the library, I am caught up – as usual – in daydreams. I am like a ghost, living half inside an unwritten draft of something only half-imagined. The other half is lodged here, in the real physical world of the fluorescent air-conditioned library building with its gaudy colour-coded stickers on the spines of every book. I am on the second floor and I can't find what I'm looking for in the non-fiction section; I'm not sure the thing I am looking for even exists. As I return to the stairs to make my way back to the ground floor, I pass a man in a creased blue rayon suit seated at one of the desks. I had seen him out on the street a little earlier, and something about the way he walked with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides and his gaze glued to the pavement made his destitution obvious, even at some distance. Now, in the library, I trace a path around him as if to give him a wide berth. But then I notice that he is busily writing something with a blunt pencil on the back of a recycled sheet of A4 paper. I change direction, walk a little closer and glance over his shoulder at the untidy scrawl.
It begins: "In London, the ...
I am strangely reassured to find that there is some kind of narrative going on inside his head, as there is so frequently in mine, something calling out to
be extracted, expressed, something not completely obvious to the outside world. But then there is the man's body language, the way he hunches forward over the page, one hand fingering, obsessively, the fabric of his blue rayon pocket. Perhaps I have been too quick to romanticise. Perhaps his scrawl is the merely the product of a serious delusion. He probably thinks he actually is in London. "Yes," I think, "that's right; he's in fantasy land, whereas the rest of us are ... what?"
We all have the need to invest in some kind of narrative, some kind of future scenario, collective or solitary. How else could we get out of bed in the morning?
Later I pass the man in the blue suit again, as I drive home. I wonder what he is thinking. He is in the thick of The New Midland, heading for a small public park opposite the old Midland primary school (now fully renovated and home to the Australian Opera Studio). Perhaps "park" is not the appropriate term for this small square – "green space" might be better. The word "park" implies somewhere people might want to play, or sit, or meet. But this new zone, the centrepiece of which is a bright new metal sculpture – an abstract human body with an expressionless face – has no seats for passersby, and the trees have been planted in raised beds full of ground cover and wood-chip so that the grassed area in the centre harbours no shade. This is a space designed to be looked at, not used. The drunks, the homeless, the drug-fucked are not welcome here. Which begs the question: if those left behind by the resources boom cannot dwell here, where can they dwell? After all, this particular suburb – as it is so clearly represented in Reg Cribb's Last Train to Freo – is already the end of the line. ♦
Notes: For the sake of privacy, the names of several of the people mentioned in this essay have been changed. Donga is a colloquial West Australian term for the transportable accommodation frequently used as single men's quarters at remote mining sites. Most dongas fit the dimensions of a sea-container to be transported easily by truck. For more information on wages, see David Uren and Alana Buckley-Carr's article, "WA wages boom", The Australian, 19 May 2006. Nicholas Keown's research is quoted in "Health Crisis in Goldfields", www.ferret.com.au, 15 August 2006.