IRON DUST IN MY LAGER
Myles Harris recalls
doctoring to an alcoholic mining village in Western Australia
PORT Dampier, Western Australia was very like the hell the Revd Brother Keegan described at school for those of us who committed sins of lust. There was a beach of sorts, grey rocks and mud, posted every hundred yards or so with a stark notice that warned 'Beware of the Sharks'. A chain link fence had been welded into a tiny protective swimming pool just below the cliff. Beyond it a flat greasy sea stretched away toward Sumatra and India. Dampier with its perpetual cloud of red dust was the rest area for the mining town of Tom Price on the edge of the Gibson desert. The week before I had signed a contract to work there with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. I thought I needed the test of lone responsibility. I was 27 and very foolish. `No flying on this one mate, can you do a forceps delivery?' asked an enormously fat interviewer wedged between two filing cabinets. 'Yes', I lied, not wanting to lose face in front of his incredibly mini-skirted assistant. 'OK, you're in,' he said, throw- ing a yellowed contract at me across the table. I backed out making hopeful noises about my surgical experience and found myself on the street. At least the money was good.
In The Dampier' I asked a Chinese barman the way. Next to me a man was winching a drink to his mouth. His left hand pulled on a neckerchief looped around his neck and tied to a shaking right hand clutching a glass of lager.
`Tom Plice up stleet, go light — very bad load,' said the Chinaman. Two miles out of town a bullet-riddled sign said, 'Tom Price — 150 miles'. A track led toward a horizon of bright green mountains, their tops de- capitated.
The outback is frighteningly still, the only movement the maddening attack of tiny bush flies. The strange shapes, the wrong quartering of the sun in the southern hemisphere, the fact that four hours into our journey we were at least 50 miles from a main road which might see only three cars a day, produced the feeling of being alone at sea in a small boat out of sight of land, a feeling of an invisible presence. We drove for six hours, twisting and sliding in the red dust, the ground temperature hovering around 140F. I began to worry about our water, and the car: It had been sold to me as 'pre-owned' by a persuasive salesman in long socks with a quiver of biros like Indian throwing knives wedged in the garter of each one By dusk, the engine knocking, we came to a water hole, drove off the track twice and then regained it on the side of a hill. On a salt pan two miles away a group of egrets began a rhythmic dance. I thought of the Walrus and the Carpenter, Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will You join the dance?' It got dark and the sides of the track became crowded with the outrageous shapes of red boomers — giant kangaroos — bumping in an out among the ghost gums. In the distance a bushfire leapt and flickered on the horizon and the Milky Way, a few of its stars blue or red in the clear air, slowly worked its way across the sky. I wondered if Australia was part of the earth at all or a monstrous chunk of another planet that flattened itself in the Pacific billions of years ago. It was not hard to imagine the fragment, its genetic mate- rial buried deep in its core, hurtling toward the meeting with the primitive earth along the arm of the spiral nebula — the path the aboriginals say they came to earth on in the dream time.
I drove off the road again and stalled. My wife began to cry. To be lost out here without water meant death when the sun rose. As the wheels spun for grip in the soft sand the headlights picked out a poker- work sign propped against a tree. It said, Welcome to Mount Tom Price.' Around the corner and a thousand feet below us was a vast pit alive with lights. An excava- tor with a shovel the size of a furniture van bit at the face of a black cliff, swinging round to load inhumanly large dumper trucks that, when full, scuttled to an ore train moving under a loading ramp the size of a small football field. When this train came back from the coast it would bring with it Tom Price's most vital import, Swan's Premium Lager. The town was a vatican of alcoholism, its only financial survivors the Chinese store owners. Between shifts the men stood at a long chromium bar, a small glass of lager, arctically chilled, in front of them; one hand under a long bushwacker chin, legs crossed, dreaming the short-circuited dreams of the chronically brain-damaged. Any violence was serviced by a short policeman with giant biceps and a set of plastic dentures one size too large for his gums. At night he would walk the 500 yards from the pub to the tiny company hospital with up to three miners trying to wrestle him down. Safely inside he would proceed to pound them into the floor. He was illiterate and invaluable. When the winter monsoon came, cutting the railway, the beer ran out. Ten of my inpatients, crazed with the DTs, took to the bush, nesting in the trees in their long nightshirts like demented ghosts. The policeman spent the night persuading them down with promises of hospital brandy.
Each day opened to the roar of heavy mining gear and the crash of the giant excavator. Apart from the mine and the bar there was only the bush. Wives went slowly mad in their brick-clad government semis, and tranquilised, were flown out to Perth. The pay was enormous. A miner could earn £1,000 a week. But very few left with anything more than they arrived in, a broken down jalopy, several boxes of beer against the 2,000-mile journey to Perth and a fund of fresh stories that swirled about the topic of grog.
There were few aboriginals in Western Australia. Those that remained stayed, wisely, far out in the Western desert shunning the killing liberalism of the De- partment of Aboriginal Affairs or the deadly embrace of welfare. Occasionally groups of two or three would appear on the edge of the mining crater, small spears in their hands, looking down. Then they would vanish.
But among the bizarre scenery the En- glish had put down roots more permanent than the Polish-Irish of Tom Price. North of Dampier there is a place called Hundred Mile Beach. It is vast, reefed with enor- mous sharks and achingly uninhabited. If you followed the dirt road along it for 50 miles you came to a group of ghost gums and a small red-tiled house. The sign outside said 'Royal Mail — Victoria Reg- ina'. Inside two elderly sisters doled out stamps, air mail letters and post to the surrounding farmers, single Woodbines to the aboriginals. They had that wonder of my English childhood, a pedal radio. They both smiled a great deal but being English they kept themselves to themselves. Their mother's generation brought Gilbert and Sullivan to the bush while their fathers rolled with aboriginal girls in the spinifex. The girls were called 'gins' because of the amount, it was said, that you had to drink to bring yourself to sleep with one.
They will have died now, it was 20 years ago. We remained in Tom Price for four months to see the three-day spring that comes every seven years and fills the desert with flowers, then we went north to Dar- win and New Guinea. They say Western Australia has changed since then, that sealed roads and Kingburger Eateries now link the north-west. But it was my first contact, when I was very young, with a country I have come to love. One of the smells of my youth is a mixture of iron ore dust and lager beer.
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