11.03.2004

The Beast

I am despondent about the election. But I just talked to a friend in Montana, one of the three liberals in that state, and he told me not to fight it.

"You can't fight this, friend. It's pre-ordained - written in the scriptures. He will rise from the ranks of your own, only revealing himself when his ascendancy is complete."


11.01.2004


This was the uncomfortable and tenuous hold I maintained with humanity for two months when I was 20. From here I moved up to mining camps and the like - but moving up was the only way to go from Wiluna. (Thanks to Ocker Jones for this photo taken recently.) Click the pic. Posted by Hello

Wiluna, End of the World

When I was 19 I was in college. A sophomore, I had not decided my major. At my school, one had to have a major to become a junior. I felt directionless. It was fun, but I wasn't getting closer to a degree.

I had an opportunity to move to Australia. A family friend, business affiliate of my father, started a company in Australia installing these enormous, crude, early satellite reflectors (eventually they would be known as dishes, but these weren't even that). After taking my first real stand against the old man, he agreed to help me get there and drop out of school for year.

I ended up in Perth in the early spring time - October. I was there for less than a week, and overwhelmed truly by what I was going through. I'd never been overseas, and the fact that I made to to Perth from my arrival in Sydney was unlikely enough. But then I was sent to Wiluna.
Wiluna is an aboriginal word that means "place of wind" and it was utterly apt. I landed on a strip that was scratched out of the red earth, and was the only one to stay in Wiluna from that flight. I was met by a guy named Terry who looked like a wrinkled sort of Popeye character. He was driving a 1962 Dodge two-ton truck with a cherry picker (the bucket thing that telephone people use to work on poles and lines).

He delivered me to the old hospital in town, which were our quarters. Single story, tin roof, verandas, a grassy court yard, old spring bunks. It was like a scene out of Breaker Morant. It was abandoned but for us and the mice.

I lived here for two months, most of the time alone. The equipment failed regularly, and we spent great amounts of time waiting for new things to come in. The truck broke, so we had to wait for more parts. Terry left - he was bored and pulled rank (he was 45 if memory serves), so I was left to fend for myself with frequently little to do but drink tins of Emu bitter and kill flies either at my compound or at the Wiluna Hotel (pub). I made a lot of kites out of newspaper and sticks, and amused the aboriginals with my many attempts at flight. Some even succeeded.

All of this we were doing so that this little aboriginal outpost could receive the Australian Broadcasting Company signal from the east coast and the west (so they got two channels of the same stuff just two hours different). But when you live in Wiluna, I learned that this is a golden respite from the howl of the wind, the flies, the screech of the white parrots (Gallahs), and the threat of being run over by drunken abos.

The Hotel above was a case study in racism, alcoholism, cronyism, and stir crazy insanity.

Ah, the tales I could tell! But it's a blog, not a book. So that's all for now...