Under ‘A’s’ leadership, our small transition team collectively slayed some big dragons. The new mine was opened up under budget and ahead of schedule – and I honestly don’t know anyone else who could’ve pulled off such a feat with such a small team.
Towards the end of 2012, ‘A’ organised a Christmas party for the gang. He was, above all else, a lad. He literally wore cowboy boots to work. He booked out an entire local hotel and bought a rich man’s bounty of seafood and alcohol to celebrate our achievement. The best Christmas party ever.
That night, some sparks flew between myself and a new admin chick, Rhi. She was absolutely stunning, so, once again, I was batting above my average. Rhi and I spent a dirty night together and rocked up to the recovery session the next day, a few moments apart (to quell the rumours). Sensing the heat between us, ‘A’ bought us a room for the next night as a Christmas present, on his personal credit card. So instead of a one-night stand, Rhi and I got an extra night of overtime, which led into a long-distance relationship that never really went anywhere. But I always loved ‘A’ for the sentiment.
After the new mine was up and running, I went back to work in Whyalla on a new assignment. The work was plentiful, but the interest: non-existent. I struggled to get out of bed of a morning, having to psych myself up to face another day of cruel and unusual punishment in the safety salt mines. It was a constant battle to pacify my negativity and choose to see the positives in my stiflingly ‘average Joe’ lifestyle.
No, I shouldn’t think badly about my job: I’m making good money; people would kill to have this job; I’ve got nice things; I’m fit and healthy; it’s a gorgeous day; I got laid on the weekend; I get to catch up with my family and friends on the reg; there are a lot of people who have it worse than me – I should be grateful for what I’ve got; this is the good life.
This societal culture of positivity was the crutch that helped me limp through the workweek, just barely making it through to the weekends. I would alter my consciousness in the obligatory Saturday night pub session, trying to permanently delete the week’s drudgery from memory. Then, it was time to reload and repeat the process again.
When I’d started out in the OH&S game, I’d naively bought into its shtick that modern workplace safety was a worthwhile cause. Over time, though, I’d started to question whether it really helped people or was just a bureaucratic embuggerance. After much soul-searching, I concluded that OH&S was just a new-age form of legislated sodomy.
I obviously hated my job, but I enjoyed having some semblance of career progression as I climbed the corporate ladder. Most days were filled with solving mysteries, such as ‘the curious case of the dude who broke his thumb with a hammer’. My incident report read: he was supposed to have both hands free for this task, but the poor fucker broke his thumb because he was carrying two folders’ worth of legally mandated safety shit in his free hand while he was trying to hammer some other shit. Thus, instead of breaking a pointless rule and losing his job, he decided to just break his thumb instead.
The latter observation was edited out of the final report, and the big bosses always met their safety bonus targets by blaming the injured bloke and downgrading the unseemly injury statistic.
Seemed illegit.
This sums up the role of a safety dude: I was never thanked for my efforts, except when a big boss personally benefited from good safety performance, or when I transported blokes to hospital after they’d been injured. This typifies my experiences as a safety advisor: I realised that no one gives a fuck if they cop a few cuts and scrapes at work, they only care about being permanently maimed or killed. But the OH&S legislation, and disingenuous corporate citizenship culture, maintains that every injury is avoidable – so, to your typical red-blooded Australian worker, the safety rules are insultingly condescending, George Orwell–style overbearing and confusingly complicated to follow. Australian OH&S legislation is one of the many reasons why Australian business struggles to compete on the global stage, because it evokes so many operational inefficiencies that a rival nation’s business doesn’t have to contend with.
I’d become a mid-level safety-advising sell-out, so was often afforded the opportunity to express my lowly pleb opinion at high-level management meetings. I was utterly mortified at what I observed. I’d always assumed that these high-level gatherings were like a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize–winning minds, but realised that it was more like a bunch of kindy kids trying to manipulate each other into surrendering their juice boxes.
The grown-ups at these meetings wore their ulterior motives on their sleeves like a wristwatch. I didn’t know why they bothered trying to hide their selfish intent; it was so obvious. Jargon and buzz words were thrown around the room, I guess to try to make each person’s position look as important as possible. I’d used the same ploy to reinforce my standing during my rig-medic interview, using big words such as ‘thoracentesis’ (jamming a tube in someone’s chest) and ‘cricothyroidotomy’ (jamming a tube in someone’s throat). Baffle them with bullshit.
But, by far, the biggest issues in these meetings were the ones not discussed. I’m surprised we could fit everyone into the meeting room alongside all the elephants. Political correctness was rife.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
Political correctness is a phenomenon born from the need for one political party to protect its unpopular decisions against the criticism of an opposing party, to ensure that they’ll be re-elected in the next term. Despite its name, however, political correctness has metastasised from the political realm to infiltrate everyday life, including business meetings, the media, and friendly backyard barbecues. It tries to keep everyone happy while pussy-footing around the real issue.
In modern times, here is how a politically correct meeting about clubbing baby-fur seals with the ivory tusk of an endangered species of elephant would pan out: We should consider the gender equality of both male and female seal clubbers; both share an equal stake in the extinction of these majestic beasts. And, most importantly, the religious beliefs of seal clubbers should be the utmost consideration, allowing everyone sufficient time to pray to their respective deities between seal-murdering episodes to apologise to Jesus (or an equivalent) for all the fucked-up shit they just did. But then again, we wouldn’t want the children to be exposed to such a graphic term as ‘seal clubbing’, so we should call the practice ‘seal population control’.
Political correctness makes people feel that they should temper their experiences, thoughts and opinions all the time, in every setting. Have you seen how politicians behave? Sniffing seats, under-the-table business dealings and turning on each other like a bunch of hyenas.
Of all the weird and wonderful forms of correctness on the market, since when is political correctness the brand that we, as a society, choose to use?
Dealing with political correctness and other forms of mid-level management madness was sucking the life force from my very soul. I’d started to become so brainwashed that my sense of self-worth hinged upon my perpetual forward career motion and declining injury-frequency rates. But, no one is going to talk about your one hundred per cent KPI success rate at your funeral. The fact that you landed the Fisher Account isn’t going to be chiselled on your tombstone. That sort of stuff is just a frivolously unimportant waste of life, although I hadn’t quite realised it yet.
Before my brain was irreparably addled with Real World zombie bullshit, my mate Marty came to the rescue. He’d spent many colourful years in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and invited me to come along for a Kokoda Track expedition. I was keen as mustard, but wanted my Big Bro to come along for the adventure as well – he’d never been outside Australia before. Luckily, Big Bro was keen, so we gave the mission a green light.
18
FLAT WALKER
I stood in line to clear PNG customs at the Port Moresby airport, 2013. The walls were painted with bright, technicolour murals. The airport didn’t exactly scream decadence, but it was by no means the dodgie
st airport I’d ever visited either. All traces of the little, niggling worries and concerns of life in the Real World washed away. I felt completely at peace, right at home – in a country I’d never set foot in before. The customs official looked me in the eye for an awkward moment, and then stamped my passport without even looking at it and waved me through.
Thank God he didn’t find the documents implicating me in JFK’s assassination, and the stash of weapons, narcotics and dismembered body parts concealed in my luggage.
We met with a few other members of our Kokoda Track group at a predetermined rally point in the airport. The group was made up of mining workers, fitness freaks, entrepreneurs and the family of an uber-successful internet company magnate. Under the direction of our super-chilled and experienced trek leader, Pete, we made our way to the awaiting bus. The wave of tropical heat and humidity was so heavy that you could hold the thick air in the palm of your hand.
Marty, my mate who’d invited me for the trip, had arrived a week earlier and was dropped off at the airport by his girlfriend. Marty was a grey-haired ex–chopper pilot in his fifties who had a fascinating worldly quality about him. Port Moresby is not a safe place, especially for white folk. But Marty had spent many years in PNG, so he knew a lot of local people and possessed what I’ll refer to as ‘dynamic safety’ – he knew the Port Moresby culture, so he could stroll down the dangerous streets without a care. Most whities just can’t do that.
The main reason that Moresby is unsafe is the Little Rascals. Despite their name, the Rascals do not commit light-hearted, Dennis the Menace pranks on cranky neighbours. They are notorious for their brutal and primitive brand of violence. In my two weeks in PNG, the local papers reported that the Rascals gang-raped a woman and slit her throat with a box cutter, brutally bashed rival gang members with metal rebar and decapitated a Japanese couple who ran a small convenience store for the minuscule amount of cash in the shop’s till. But, by far, the most heinous Rascals crime, and the incident that was given the most publicity in the Moresby papers, was that they vandalised the outer fence of a multinational mining company. Brutes.
I had my bus window tightly closed as we rolled past the Moresby markets, a known Rascals stronghold.
The bus trundled through the more populated areas of Moresby, making its way up into the hills. The streets were lined with makeshift stalls selling fruit and nick-nacks, the stall owners trying to eke out some sort of living as best they could amid oppressive unemployment. The whole joint had that unmistakably third-world smell about it: burning rubbish mixed with substandard sanitation, rotting vegetation and stale sewage. But as the bus negotiated its way out of the Moresby suburbs, the scenery and the smells dramatically changed. Higher up in the mountains, the region was breathtaking. Thick, dense jungle replaced poverty-stricken slums as magical waterfalls cascaded down steep rock faces into the picturesque valleys below.
The roads were in a state of dangerous disrepair. The tight, winding, single-lane routes into the mountains were gouged with potholes. Do you think this stopped our bus driver from negotiating the tight turns like a rally-car driver? Did it fuck. Despite the vehicle’s Boeing 737–like turning circle and shrill, mechanical, whining protests, the maniac drove that bus like he’d stolen it.
He narrowly avoided wiping out an entire family travelling in the opposite direction as we rounded a blind corner, swerving faster than the speed of a hit-and-run crime to avoid the collision. He only slowed, marginally, to traverse a dodgy bridge that looked like it was made of balsa wood before accelerating into the next blind bend and cursing angrily at a stray dog that was unlucky enough to find itself in the kill-zone of the homicidal bus.
I fell out of the bus and kissed the terra firma when we arrived at our destination, Sogeri Lodge. That night, we soaked up the last few luxuries of civilisation, enjoying a proper bed, tasty food and porcelain shitter.
The next morning, we stepped off for the nine-day, 96-kilometre trek. During the Pacific War, Kokoda was of strategic importance to both the Australians and the Japanese, who were trying to use PNG as a staging point to invade The Land Down Under (or so it was rumoured). The Kokoda Track was the main highway through the PNG jungle, inaccessible to vehicles and machinery, so foot-mounted warfare was the tactic of the day. Kokoda was the scene of prolonged, violent and brutal conflict between the Japs and the Aussies, and stands as one of the most historically significant wars in Australia’s history. In modern times, walking the Kokoda Track has become an almost spiritual pilgrimage for Australians; an essential experience on the bucket list.
We met our army of local PNG porters for the trek at Ower’s Corner. One of the fitness freaks, Big Bro, Marty and I were the only ones who opted to carry our own packs. Everyone else hired a porter. Hiring a porter is by no means a sign of weakness – it actually enhances the enjoyment of the trek and pumps precious funds into the local economy – but I just couldn’t bear the embarrassment of letting someone else carry my shit for me. The long journey started with a single step, and our expedition slowly put one foot in front of the other as the adventure kicked off.
The forty-person group proceeded in a single line along the extraordinarily muddy track. The first few hours were spent battling gravity, trying to keep our feet as we made our way down the steep jungle path into a deep valley. This mud wasn’t normal mud; it was made from dishwashing detergent, slippery glacial ice and petroleum-based lubricant. I lost balance too many times to count, looking like an ungraceful Benny Hill slapstick routine before unconvincingly regaining my footing.
An hour into the trek, my mind wandered, and I started to romanticise about how much I was enjoying this adventure. In that moment, with my wanderlust concentration focused elsewhere, both feet slipped out from underneath me and I landed flat on my ass. As I tried to stand up, the heavy weight of my pack wasn’t centred over my body, so I slipped again in the mud and landed straight back in the same position. In this Astroglide type of mud, your default position was flat on your back if you weren’t constantly mindful of your centre of gravity. Leaning just one inch forwards or backwards of centre was enough to put you on your ass. Big Bro helped me up and I continued down the track. The butt region of my tan-coloured pants looked like I was the victim of explosive diarrhoea. As a saving grace, most people slipped over at least twenty times in the first hour. We looked like a bunch of toddlers learning to walk for the very first time.
After a few hours of slick stepping through the jungle, we arrived at a clearing with a few small wooden huts adorning the grassy knoll and a gorgeous flowing river bending around the village. This place was known as Imita Base Camp, our destination for morning tea. While we trekkers sat around drinking tea and chowing down on biscuits, an advanced party of porters stepped off for the next leg of the journey. All of a sudden, a porter raced back to the village urgently yelling something in pidgin. Pete, the trek leader, raced off into the jungle. We had no clue what was happening. One of the elderly porters in the group had dropped dead from a massive heart attack about seventy metres up the track. Pete did CPR for a few minutes, but he couldn’t re-establish a pulse. Not that it would have been much good if he did get a pulse back; we were about three hours into the jungle, with no means of extraction. It would have taken about five hours to get the porter back to a hospital that was equipped to deal with this medical emergency. He was dead.
Pete informed us of the tragedy, and the mood around the group, trekkers and porters alike, fell sombre. There would be no more walking that day out of respect for the fallen, so Imita Base Camp became our default night position. About an hour later, the porters had fashioned a makeshift stretcher from pure resourcefulness and ingenuity, and they carried the deceased porter’s body through the camp back to Ower’s Corner, where we’d started. The body was mostly wrapped in a tarpaulin, but I could still see the exposed feet and toes bounce around lifelessly as the stretcher-bearers moved the corpse back down the track.
The next day, some of
the porters ventured out into the jungle and scrounged some bright, multicoloured flowers and palm fronds to erect a temporary memorial at the spot where the porter had died. I don’t often use the word ‘blessed’ because I think it’s one of the most overused words in the English language and its meaning has been cheapened, but in this instance it’s the only word I can find that fits. I felt truly blessed to witness the ceremony at the porter’s memorial, a privilege reserved for only a lucky few. His mates sang traditional songs to honour the memory of their fallen comrade, not by mourning his death, but by celebrating his life. A genuine once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But the show must roll on. We had some extra kilometres to cover to make up for the time we’d lost, so the next few days were early starts and late finishes to get back on schedule. We trudged our way up a steep hill to Imita Ridge, a significant locale in the Kokoda conflict, and dipped down into a deep valley, where we crossed the Ua’Ule Creek before travelling upwards again to Ioribaiwa.
While the trekkers were still learning how to walk in this undulating, muddy environment, the local porters made it look like child’s play. Many porters didn’t wear shoes, because their feet had become genetically designed to thrive in these mountainous conditions. Their feet were naturally widened, with insanely flexible ankle joints that gave them a greater surface area for stability, and super-flexi ligaments to accommodate sudden changes in direction. While the rest of us were slipping and sliding down the track, the porters could sprint past us (carrying a twenty-kilogram pack) without any fear of falling over. More than that, I noticed that the porters always kept one constant pace, regardless of whether they were going uphill or downhill, and they never seemed to break a sweat. By contrast, we tended to try to steam up the mountains and puffed ourselves out, which slowed our pace. Then, we’d try to catch up to the porters on the downhills, further exhausting our energy. We Australians simply didn’t know how to walk in the mountains; this is why the PNG porter legends referred to us as Flat Walkers. After thirty-odd years of putting one foot in front of the other, I realised I’d never even learnt how to walk.
Bad Medicine Page 19