Love and Other U-Turns

by Louisa Deasey

  The couple are serving beers and Paris is chopping up lemons, her flesh exposed to the preparation of food and a sharp knife, beer taps and open saloon doors. She’s clad in a black see-through negligee, a g-string and chunky heels, and I admire her ability to do physical work in such a get-up. But it also just looks so peculiar.

  There’s something almost clinical about having someone’s flesh so exposed while you are drinking, eating and sitting around. She makes no attempt to hold in her stomach or stand in a flattering way. The bar is too busy. She’s puffing and panting, working just as hard as the other – clothed – bar-staff. But her vulnerability shows, no clothes to make up a story, this is her body. On show.

  Soon, she comes to do a ‘round’ with her pot glass. She stops awkwardly in front of Jim. ‘Would you like to see my breasts?’

  ‘Ahh, oh thanks but I’m okay. Thanks though!’ Jim is awkward. Polite. Didn’t we just meet in the urinal? he doesn’t say. She’s just doing her job.

  I look away when the drunk guy next to me says yes to her offer, out of respect for his private ‘show’, but I see him put a fiver in her glass. Afterwards, he turns proudly to me, as if he’s done a community service. She moves on quickly with that peculiar half-smile, and I see the young guy who is in the room directly across from us turn her down, despite his obvious inebriation. Shaking his head decisively, like she’s offered him a ticket for the meat raffle.

  ‘Nah love. Not today. Waiting for me pay …’ He looks back up at the television.

  ‘They make a packet, those girls,’ one says to Jim, letting it dangle in the air for me to absorb too.

  ‘… Do two weeks in one place, get their meals and accommodation, only do an eight-hour shift max … pretty good life.’

  As a miner, he’s used to thirteen hours underground at a time. But still – I know that the skimpies only get thirty dollars an hour. When I was working as a waitress in some of Melbourne’s better restaurants, I’d make that, with tips. And I didn’t need to slice lemons with a bare chest or pull beers in stilettos. But I guess it’s the same thing. Doing a job – for the money.

  ‘Gotta be careful, but. Some of ’em show their nipples to get more tips, but we tell ’em not to when the cops are making the rounds,’ says one of the guys sitting near Jim.

  The nipple law strikes me as hilarious. It’s technically illegal for them to expose their nipples, and so the ones who don’t wear negligees usually cover them with ‘stickers’. Little stars, coy little hearts. At worst, a piece of tape.

  Looking around the miner’s pub, which smells like beer and sweat and sounds like groaning and feels like hard work and dirt, it’s no wonder this strange job description – a skimpy – exists, as a way to ‘slot in’ some femininity in an extreme way. If ‘femininity’ is what you’d call it. In a way, it’s a brutal femininity.

  Paris, slicing lemons, sweating as she pours beers. Clomping around the bar, pulling down her top in one jerky movement.

  Oddly, I miss women’s clothes. A flash of a colourful scarf here, a creative pairing of boots and dress there. Something hidden. Mystery, subtlety. Style. Beauty for the sake of beauty, not flesh for the sake of flesh. But things are sort of – sped up – here. The men only have a certain number of hours to get their ‘fix’ of women. Give me a naked one. Now. I imagine their hunter-gatherer brains ticking over.

  Jim holds my hand under the bar where no-one can see it, rubbing his thumb against the palm of my hand. Back in our room we discuss the whole thing like we’re doing a Masters in Aussie outback culture.

  Paris leaves the door to her room ajar, shares the showers with patrons, and comes and goes like the ‘temp’ that she is. The couple who run the pub work alongside her g-stringed form, and it’s all just the way it is. It’s all about the money. Something you do, in between worlds.

  The only time I remember that skimpies are ‘unheard’ of in the east of Australia is when I email my friends. ‘What’s a skimpy?’ most of them ask.

  Paris – or whoever the skimpy of the week is – provides some visual relief from a day spent underground, and brings in the patrons, thirsty for beer no matter what time they’ve clocked off their shift. In return she gets a bed, a room and her pay. And when she’s done, she leaves TV Soap magazine and a jar of instant coffee for the next girl.

  She has red hair and a face so caked with make-up it’s hard to tell where she is on the time-line between eighteen and thirty. Her eyes are turquoise blue, a colour so unnatural it must be contacts, I decide. I would too, if I felt all those men looking hungrily into my soul as I poured them beers, I think.

  Paris has a strange half-smile which she uses on the patrons, not betraying a ripple of a clue about her character or personality. I realise I’m the only other girl in the pub in her age demographic, wearing make-up. She looks at me, slightly confused at my being here, but still with that unquestioning acceptance. She sleeps in the room beside us, with the window overlooking the balcony where I write in the dry heat. Through it I spy the anonymous clues to her life: an unkempt bed, a jar of vitamins, an NW magazine open to a story on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, curled in the heat. Beside the bed is a James Patterson thriller half read, the wrapper of a chocolate bar and the TV left switched on to a soap opera. Just like a summer holiday.

  After she’s finished her shift that afternoon, a man pulls into the car park, honks his horn until she jumps in, looking straight ahead. She gets in wearing a denim miniskirt and stripy singlet, then leans over to kiss him. He pulls out swiftly, kicking up a cloud of dust on the gravel road.

  Boulder and Kalgoorlie are the twin cities of Western Australia’s Goldfield region; an area home to over fifty operating mines hacked deep into the rich red earth. Faded newspaper articles from the gold rush herald stories of a man’s fortune changed in an instant, woken that day with the clothes on his back, digging away at the dream of a nugget the size of a cherry, enough to change his family’s fortune for the rest of his life.

  The first yell of ‘Gold!’ in 1893 inspired a mass exodus to the area, from areas as far as the eastern states. All these men, dreaming of a better life, trekking through the waterless desert on a dream.

  We visit Coolgardie – forty kilometres from Kalgoorlie – on Sunday. A ghost town now, only one of its twenty pubs still open for public consumption, historic signs dotting the empty main street which speak of its height, when it had a bigger boom than Kalgoorlie. Sad tales of men walking in 1892, the 110-mile waterless journey from Southern Cross on foot, only stopping at the rare stations, to get a life-saving cup of tea in the heat.

  With no running water for washing, drinking or disinfecting, disease, dysentery and death spread fast. But still they kept coming, all those men, hungry for gold.

  All the pubs seem to have a nugget story here, a reminder of the richness which hides under the crust of earth, and perhaps more sinisterly, to remind all the miners of why they’ve given up any semblance of having a balanced, ‘normal’ life. What is normal anyway? You so quickly lose the old versions you used to have, especially if the need is strong enough – and they all come here with the same desire: a stint in ‘Kal’ to set themselves up for the future. Climb down into a mineshaft and don’t go back to the city until you’ve earnt enough to keep you going for life. But when is it ever enough?

  Downstairs in the main bar at the Golden Eagle is the framed newspaper story from the Kalgoorlie Miner, proclaiming the particular nugget on which this pub was founded. This one was found right near the surface in 1930, a seventeen-year-old the lucky striker, hitting six thousand pounds with his humble pick and shovel. Since every pub has a story of a nugget found under its floors, as recently as the 1940s, you have the sense that there is still gold hovering under the floorboards of the cheaply constructed houses which litter the streets of Boulder and Kalgoorlie. But where the beauty of gold would seem to suggest that the place should be rich and regal, the money and wealth is spent on men’s tools: utes, bullbearings, tyres.r />
  Mum’s roses would never bloom here. Just wildflowers, with lots and lots of prickles and weeds.

  That feeling – of men who’ve come here for one thing, and one thing only, to change their fortunes through the sweat of their brow and nothing else – permeates every part of Kalgoorlie. It’s a hunger, an aggression, a paradoxical mixture of greed and integrity, to ‘make good for the family’, or just scrape themselves back from nothing. Mostly, though, it’s young men I see, pouring their mining wages into hotted-up utes, into the tills at the plethora of pubs, or keeping the goldfields’ sex industry afloat.

  The gold lying below the surface in Western Australia will probably always hold this appeal to white men. After the longest drought in history in the eastern states, we learn that the same things still drive men, a hundred years later, to leave ailing farms and businesses to try to make good in the West.

  After Coolgardie, we head to the Superpit, a massive mine just up the top of the city, so big it’s like a city of its own. It would take a truck an hour to drive through its daunting roads of chiselled granite, hundreds of years of layers and digging, and still there’s more. The daily blasts are a visual reminder of the violence of twenty-first-century mining, like hand grenades thrown in a war. Except there’s no war, it’s supposed to be our own country.

  Late that night we are lying in our bed when the earth shudders dramatically and the walls rattle. I assume it’s an earthquake.

  ‘Babe?’ I tug Jim’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s just the pit, Lou.’

  The Superpit, mined twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, is the largest open-cut mine in the world. Part of The Golden Mile which sparked the biggest Gold Rush in Australian history, it has been drilled and blasted for gold for so long that its gaping, carved wound is visible from space.

  In the morning I jog past utes and red dust to the lookout perch on the side. From this vantage point, goliath-sized trucks, endlessly carting material up and down its roads, look as small as Tonka toys.

  A hundred years of digging in particularly mineral-rich areas has left gaping holes littered around Western Australia, long abandoned when the bounty has been drilled out. It seems so greedy – to just take and take, in ever more extreme ways.

  I remember reading of Aboriginal ‘grazing’ methods, back in Melbourne where you can talk about these things much more philosophically because it’s not in-your-face. The nomadic tribes, who hunted and picked their own food from bountiful areas, had a silent understanding that you never take more than a third of the crop from a certain area, no matter how hungry you are. ‘You must leave enough for it to regenerate.’ It’s this concept of thinking about no less than six generations ahead and the innate regenerative capacity of the land, before their own stomachs, that is in grave contrast to the violent greed of mining with equipment which sends earthquake-like shudders to houses kilometres away.

  There are no TV cameras here, nobody worried about being politically correct or environmentally sound or impressing voters. It’s almost primal, like rape; violent, forced digging into the earth’s crust, now aided by gigantic electrical equipment.

  And the strange assumption that it will go on forever. Or when this part is fully mined, you’ll start again somewhere else.

  After visiting Coolgardie, I become curious as to how the first water pipes were laid down. A sift through the book rack at the Coolgardie museum reveals it was an Irish engineer, Charles Yelverton O’Connor, who was responsible for the most ambitious water-supply scheme in Australian history. But oddly, his luck seemed to have done a sharp U-turn halfway through the trajectory of the project. A year before the long-drawn-out Mundaring Weir scheme was completed, he shot himself unexpectedly, leaving behind his wife and seven children. There’s a suspicious lack of information on why such a brilliant and ambitious man would have worked so hard and given it all up one sad morning. Jim purchases one of his biographies at the museum, and we read it together, lying in bed, that night.

  ‘You notice something missing from this story?’

  ‘You mean, the Aboriginals?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Nowhere in the chronological treatise on O’Connor and this area of Australia, which was still largely inhabited by Aboriginal people back then, does it even explore the topic of Aboriginal tribal history in the sites chosen for the Weir.

  ‘That’s the thing about Western Australia, Lou. Whole other ball game when it comes to land rights and Aboriginal history.’

  I can’t help but think that by disrespecting a space considered sacred to the oldest living culture on the planet, you might call upon you some bad ‘vibes’. Or, just to get really superstitious, a curse.

  Watching a documentary on sacred Aboriginal sites, months later, I learn that O’Connor used one of their most sacred watering holes for the Mundaring Weir project. After one of the original tribes attempted to convince him to relocate the project, and he refused, a curse was put on his life. It’s not surprising that the curse never made it into the museums. But it haunts me to think how hard it is to find out about what is violated. Where I am walking, the spirits I could be disturbing. And that sighing, sad resolution that what my skin represents is two hundred years of brutality to a race which would never dream of using a drill to hack into the earth and sell the proceeds to each other, for nothing but a profit turned so quick.

  The day has cooled to a slow simmer by the time the game is over, and like a dog cooped up all day in a hot house, I’m eager to go for a walk. I forget where I am, temporarily, slipping on my shoes and ready to explore this new town. But time has stopped in a certain era here. It’s that time when men’s public spaces were bars, restaurants, billiard rooms and brothels. And the women were either prostitutes or hiding out in the parlour. Jim has been here before, though.

  ‘I’m coming with you, Lou.’ He says he needs to get his body back after days of driving but I notice concern on his face, at my naively strolling outside in this extremely aggressive space.

  Shops which sell bullbearings, alcohol, cars, tyres, pipes, wheels, tools, hardware and truck parts glisten in the amber sunset, along with hotels on every corner and a precinct entirely devoted to bordellos. We walk in peaceful silence through the balmy night, holding hands as ‘We Are the Champions’ echoes out the doors of hotels along with the sound of drunk men singing, fights brewing, stumbling and swearing on every corner. And further down, we pass Aboriginal men on the street, swigging from bottles, rolling their eyes back in their heads in delirium, not noticing us as we pass.

  The flipside of the emphasis on money-making in the goldfields is the nonchalant acceptance of a stranger appearing to start over again. They don’t ask where you’ve been or where you’re from. They ask if you’re looking for work. It’s assumed you are here to earn money in an industry linked to miners or sex, and there is no shame in putting material gain above all other concerns for a time in your life. Back in Melbourne, university students would be living on two-minute noodles whilst studying for a degree in politics. It’s almost like a different race.

  Since we’re out, and Jim is his own agent, we wander into a few pubs, Jim spruiking his wares, telling managers about his show and offering to leave a poster. One reeks so strongly of last night’s vomit, sweat and stale beer that I have to hold my nose to stand there, while the manager blows a plume of smoke at Jim’s face.

  ‘Mate, I’ve gotta ask. Do ya swear?’

  ‘Yeah, a bit,’ Jim says, chuckling nervously at the understatement and pulling out one of his t-shirts to prove the point.

  The manager, a burly guy with a huge beer belly and a tattoo of a speared heart on the crown of his head, grins approvingly, exposing a missing front tooth. ‘Oh good. Otherwise they’d think you were a poofter.’

  We walk back to Boulder, passing thin-walled houses with the doors left open, television lights flickering and abandoned strollers in the front yard. Broken objects betray the apathy of desert heat. In more than a few,
I make out the shadows of overweight women in the doorway, and they eye us as we walk past, without saying hello.

  Jim waits outside, stretching on the street while I buy a tub of yoghurt from the small supermarket near the Golden Eagle. When I go to pay the woman has her hand out, scowling at me, eyeing me up and down with suspicion. Is it my dress? The fact that I’m not obese, like most of the white women in this town? So far Paris is the only girl who’s smiled at me, not looked at me with suspicion and made me feel guilty for wearing a dress, like I’m a traitor.

  Just before we arrive back at the Golden Eagle, Jim comes out of The Rock Inn beaming, walking quickly despite the fact that we’ve just done eight kilometres in the hot night. ‘It’s game on, Lou.’

  He must have struck it lucky. He only ever uses sporting terminology when he’s had good news. ‘Two gigs. Next week. Aww yeah!’

  The manager had taken an instant liking to him, asking him to compere a wet t-shirt competition and do a Big Night Out show. ‘I’m gunna let loose in Boulder, Kalgoorlie!’ he says, looking like a kid who’s just been given a pile of pocket money and doesn’t know what he’s going to spend it on. ‘I reckon I can even do my Japanese flag gag here!’ he punches the sky like he’s just won a tennis match. ‘It looks like we’re moving to The Rock Inn on Monday!’

  I wonder if the shower is next to a urinal at The Rock Inn. If it’s not, things are definitely looking up for me.

  17

  Australian style

  ‘We don’t often get ladies here …’

  IN KALGOORLIE, BY MIDDAY THE sun is a searing ball of fire, and it’s easy to understand how soft-drinks and air-conditioned cars have taken their toll on so many bodies here, male and female, all disproportionately bigger than anywhere else in the country. I’m determined not to follow suit, which means I need to go running before it’s skin-cancer scorching.

  On the Sunday morning I slip quietly out of the bed leaving Jim breathing huskily, the way he does in the midst of a deep sleep. It’s only 6 am, and already I am sweating. I pull on my shorts and take my phone, leaving our one key to the room on the table beside him, in case he needs to go to the bathroom while I’m gone. I walk up the main street and start jogging, and very soon hit dusty roads on the periphery of town. I keep a vague mental map of where I came from, and just enjoy the vast, open roads with silent houses sleeping off their grand-final day hangovers. Beer cartons are tossed carelessly aside broken fences, rubbish lying on dirt, tin roofs shining in the hot sun.