by Tony Horwitz
“Two bags.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“One for her, and one for you, in case hers tears open.”
Laughter. More beer. More chop suey. The men of the Pilbara, like the mines in which they labor, display all the sensitivity of a gang bang. Their rapaciousness will be equally short-lived. But unlike Cossack, Port Hedland doesn’t sit so lightly on the land. When the minerals play out and the people drift away, their ghosts will linger in the pitted earth and the rusted tangle of smokestacks.
22 … Going Troppo
For the twentieth consecutive morning, I awake in an unfamiliar town. Pub beds, however, are becoming depressingly familiar. My lumpy mattress is within an arm’s length of an electric jug, just like the jug I reached for in Geraldton and Fremantle and Esperance and Coober Pedy and anywhere else I’ve stayed at a pub. The complimentary biscuits are stale. I eat them anyway; my acceptance of all things free has become instinctive. I stir one packet of instant coffee into hot water, and then another, and then another. But my nervous system refuses to wake. My toes can’t find their thongs. Even my finger wants to chuck a sickie.
A cardboard sign—BROOME PLEASE!—leans against my pack, mocking me. I have taken to scrawling signs at night, like a child saying his bedtime prayers. Only once have I failed to reach the appointed destination. The props are in order. I know the way through three miles of dust-choked streets to the main highway east. All that remains is for me to get up off this lumpy bed.
I reach for a newspaper on the floor instead, and feel the same melancholic twinge as I did yesterday when I noticed the date on the front-page banner. The Jewish festival of Passover, which commemorates the biblical escape from slavery in Egypt, is about to begin. The occasion is traditionally celebrated en famille, with a drunken feast called “seder.” Passover is really more of a cultural than a religious celebration; prayer takes a backseat to singing and eating and drinking sweet Kosher wine, at least in my family. Also, it’s about liberation, which is an okay thing to celebrate, religious or not. The thought of spending seder night over a pub meal in the Pilbara makes me feel more than a little despondent.
I reach for the Port Hedland phone book. Who am I kidding? I’ve got as much chance of locating a Jew in the Pilbara as I have of finding manna in the desert. I check the Yellow Pages. No synagogue, predictably, nor anything called church that might be a Jewish temple in disguise. Catholic, Methodist, Latter Day Saints. I flip to the white pages and start searching for Semitic names … Bernstein … Cohen … Goldberg … Goldstein … nothing. Even if I did find one, what would I do? Call them up at dawn and say, “I was just wondering if you’re Jewish”? Levy … Rosenberg … Steinberg … Weiner…. Not a thing. Not even a German-sounding surname that might actually be Jewish. Just an Anglo-Saxon litany of Browns and Harrises and Smiths.
I look out the window at the reddish-brown buildings and the reddish-brown streets. Just as well, I guess. Twelve hours in Port Hedland and already I feel the rust setting in. If I stay here another night, I’ll be as road-worthy as an abandoned car.
Half an hour later, on the street outside, a car limps past and grinds to a halt thirty yards farther on. Not for me, I assume; I’m not interested in local traffic and didn’t bother to stick out a finger. And the way this guy’s climbing out of the car suggests either mechanical trouble or a wicked hangover.
“Where ya headed?” he calls to me. Even his words seem to limp out of his vocal cords.
“Broome. How about you?”
“Broome, eventually. If you’re not in a hurry, I can get you there.”
Normally, I am suspicious of unsolicited rides. Sort of like candy from a stranger or, more typically, the preamble to a homosexual proposition. But there are no other cars on the road and I’m not exactly zapping with energy, so I climb aboard.
Dave is sluggish, even by Nor’west standards. It takes him twenty minutes to swallow the Coke he’s just purchased in Hedland. Sipping it slows him down to twenty-five miles an hour; when he’s done, we reach our cruising speed of forty. This gives me time to take in the full breadth of Hedland’s ugliness, in slow motion. A huge salt plant with massive white dunes slides onto the surrounding plain. Railroad cars filled with iron ore stretch in a line toward the horizon, going on forever. In the opposite direction, gray-faced men in reddish-brown cars drive to another day in the industrial hive. Then we reach bare, hard scrub again, stretching ahead of us for several hundred miles.
Two hours after picking me up and still less than sixty miles out of Hedland, Dave pulls in for a sausage roll at a mining town called Goldsworthy. Twenty minutes later we are still parked in the shade while Dave munches meditatively on the crumbs. I feel as if I’m watching a Death Row inmate finish off his last supper. So I wander off to see the sights of Goldsworthy, which consist of a water tank imprisoned inside a locked cage and a sign warning that anyone who pilfers from an adjoining ice supply is subject to prosecution. Not much of an oasis.
We water instead 120 miles farther on, at a roadhouse called Sandfire. It is well named, sitting as it does in the middle of a burning semidesert. And it is well placed, like the pubs in the Northern Territory, to scoop up thirsty cars and drivers coming from either direction; as a sign near the roadhouse announces, there’s no more petrol for 170 miles.
The Sandfire Roadhouse also shares the Territory’s penchant for outback whimsy. There’s no bush bank here, just a curious repository called the Sandfire Sleazey Sleeveless Shirt Club. To join, the traveler need only pay two dollars and cut off his own shirtsleeve. The money goes to the Flying Doctors and the sleeve is pinned to the ceiling, which looks like a laundry line after a storm: shredded bits of unmatched cloth, dropping almost onto the heads of drinkers.
Shearing off a sleeve and pinning it to the rafters occupies five minutes or so; drinking a beer consumes another ten. But Dave is still only midway through his eating. So I kill another ten minutes studying the Broome phone listings. No synagogues again. No -witzes, -steins, or -bergs even. Just me. The only Jew for thousands of miles, wandering in the desert as my heathen escort munches on sausage rolls.
Dave is on an exodus of his own, which he tells me about during the hot, dull drive after Sandfire. He left a factory job in Melbourne six months ago to find some other work, some other place to settle down. “I grew up on a farm, which was hard yakka,” he says. “But you only shovelled shit until the shit was gone, then you knocked off. In the factory, you’d spend all day doing half a day’s work. I couldn’t hack it.”
Now, after several months of travel, Dave’s money is running out. He reckons he’s only got enough for six more days of petrol and sausage rolls. “Someplace around Darwin, I’ll just pull off the road and take whatever work I can get,” he says. I push away thoughts of my own impending return to the office.
Late in the day we reach a roadhouse on the outskirts of Broome. It has taken us eleven hours to cover a distance of 360 miles. “What a car,” Dave says, puttering over for another ration of sausage roll. “If it was a woman, I’d marry it.”
I begin hiking briskly toward town. A hundred feet from the roadhouse, my pace slows from a full gallop to a canter. A hundred feet farther on, the canter becomes a trot, then a slow amble. My shirt is soaked. Somewhere beneath me, ten toes are swimming in their thongs. Even my eyes are sweating. I spy a bench across the road and stagger over to collapse on it.
The climate has switched on me again. Inland Western Australia is baked and arid, but the sea is bordered by sultry mangrove swamps. Cossack gave me a taste of humidity. Now Broome’s giving me the full show.
I hadn’t expected the tropics to surprise me this way. After all, I was raised in a city that is built on a swamp. Every summer in Washington, D.C., there’s a kind of boggy revenge, when the air doesn’t move and the heat and humidity seep up through the concrete. Even the government grinds to a halt.
But Washington’s mugginess is minor league compared to Broome’s. At least the scen
ery is refreshing after so many days of uninterrupted scrub. There are palm trees lining the street and black-skinned natives in bright clothes lolling past: Aborigines of course, in what looks like cast-off clothing from St. Vincent de Paul’s. But if I squint hard enough it could be a travel poster for Fiji or Jamaica.
There’s architecture to match my tropical fantasy. Across the street is a raised, one-story wooden house with a 360-degree veranda. It looks like a jerry-built parody of a plantation in Louisiana, the kind of home where you expect to see a planter in a white suit and a wide Panama hat, sipping mint juleps.
I continue in a slow shuffle down the wide, hot street. A mile farther on, there’s still no sign of a pub, but there is a sprawling house with cyclone shutters and a roof that spreads like a wide-brimmed hat, casting a cool shadow all the way around. Better still, there’s the hum of an air-conditioner in one window, and a sign that says public library. I stagger inside, drop my pack, and sprawl on the floor beside it.
A middle-aged woman smiles at me from behind a pile of filing cards. Apparently, it’s acceptable behavior in Broome to collapse in a sweaty heap at the first public building you come to. Smiling back at her, it occurs to me that I’ve never met a mean librarian.
“This is nothing,” she says cheerily. “You should have been here a month ago. Talk about hot!”
I have heard this line, or something similar, about six dozen times since leaving Sydney. It seems I’ve been trailing the worst heatwave in Australian history, by just a few days, all the way across the continent.
“Hot enough for me, thanks.”
“In the wet season,” she continues, “in the Wet, people just go troppo. Completely crazy. There’s nothing to do but wait out the rain at the pub.”
The Wet sounds rather soothing at the moment. So does the pub. I ask her for directions.
“The Continental sells more beer than any hotel in Australia,” she says. “But everyone goes to the Roebuck.” I nod. Nor’west economics.
She walks me over to a picture of the Roebuck on a wall in the next room. It is an old black-and-white photo of publican Bill “Possum” Ward posing in front of a colonial-style wooden building. He has his arms crossed over his chest, a proud, almost defiant smile on his face, and two flappers in bathing suits standing to either side. The photo is dated 1920.
“The prettiest girls are always at the Roebuck,” she says. It is an odd comment, coming from a schoolmarmish librarian. The wink is even odder. Not knowing what else to do, I wink back, then pull on my pack and head for the pub.
The Roebuck looks as if it hasn’t changed too much since Possum’s day. Low-slung and a bit ramshackle, it is the collection point for all the continental drift that washes up at Broome. A group of well-tanned men—fishermen or sailors, it seems—sip rum and Cokes by the door. Most of them have tattoos; all of them have earrings. They’re watching a woman in a sleeveless cotton dress who is playing pool with another woman in an orange sarong. In the corner, two hippies dance slowly to a blues song on the jukebox. There is not an unhandsome person in the bar. Taken together, the crowd has a shabby, tropical sort of style, like a Club Med weekend gone to seed.
Disguised beneath the earrings and sarongs is a racial mix unlike any I’ve ever seen. The Aboriginal blood is obvious, but there’s also an Asian influence, or several strains of Asian, and a touch of Spanish as well. What’s more striking, though, is that no one appears to belong to just one ethnic group. There are mocha-colored men with delicate Asian features, and women with Oriental coloring but broad Aboriginal noses or startling blue eyes.
It’s all to do with the pearls, of course. Malays and Japanese and Filipinos and Chinese and Koepangers (Timorese of Portuguese descent, which accounts for the Spanish look) and Thursday Islanders and, finally, a few Europeans—all came here at the end of the nineteenth century to dive for mother-of-pearl. After 1901 immigration policy took a racist turn, and White Australia laws forbade Asians bringing their families along, so the melting pot was stirred a little more. And even before the pearlers came, there were longboats swooping down from Malaysia to ply these shores for a delicacy called sea slug or “bêche-de-mer.” This history is recorded in the Asiatic features of many Aborigines hereabouts and also in the local cuisine. Some Aboriginal clans around Broome still cook their turtles Indonesian style, with chili and garlic.
I order a beer and ask the barmaid whether the pearling fleet is in or out.
“In,” she says. “In here.” She points at the brawny, bronzed mob I’d spotted near the door. Apparently this is all that remains of what was once the biggest pearling fleet in the world. “Guy with the towel’s the best diver in Broome,” she says. “The one he’s talking to is a dealer.”
I sidle up to the diver. The towel, which is wrapped around his bare, bulging pectorals, gives him the look of a prizefighter, except that he has a complete set of gleaming teeth and a long, unbroken nose.
I buy a round and begin quizzing him about pearling.
“Our boat’s out for ten days, in for one, then out for ten again.” He taps the side of his beer glass. “Never really lose our sea legs.” He downs his beer in one swig and heads for the toilet. Apparently one round doesn’t buy very much information in Broome.
I have a go at his companion, a tall, swarthy man with a droopy moustache, jet-black hair, and two gold loops hanging from one ear. His appearance, like the diver’s, begs for a tourist question.
“Where are you from?” I ask him. “I mean, where’s your family from before Broome?” It comes out a bit awkward but he doesn’t seem to mind.
“Koepanger, way back,” he says. “That bloke you were just talking to is from Thursday Island.” What’s curious, though, is that despite their exotic appearance, the men have broad ocker accents. The melting pot has had some time on the fire in Broome.
I forge ahead: “You’re a dealer, right?” The Koepanger’s face goes blank, but I continue. “How does it work? Do you buy from them or do the divers come to you?”
He turns away, as if to talk to the back of a man on the next stool. Then he turns to face me again, with an expression that is quizzical, almost hostile. “You serious, mate? Or you some kind of pig?”
Pig?
“I’m nosey, if that’s what you mean.” His face doesn’t change. “Sorry,” I continue. “It’s just that the barmaid said he was a diver and you were a dealer, so I thought I’d learn a little bit about pearling. That’s all.”
The man studies my face for a few seconds, then laughs. “You got it all wrong, mate, I deal hemp, not pearls. But I’m lying low right now, because the town is crawling with narcs.” He points at a man across the bar with a red bandanna and wire-rimmed glasses. “Try that bloke over there.”
It seems like a polite exit from an awkward conversation. So I wander across the bar, which is suddenly crowded with evening traffic. Wire Rims gives me an amiable smile as I approach. What does he deal, I wonder, pearls or grass?
He’s wondering the same thing about me. As I slide onto the next stool, he says out of the side of his mouth: “Buying or selling?”
“Neither, sorry.”
“Shit. I saw you talking to The Man and thought maybe you were on to some dope.” We sit silently for a moment. “Anyway, I’m Mark. This is Gavin. Join the bloody club.”
Mark doesn’t seem to be a club member. Short and balding and a bit anxious, he looks like a frazzled graduate student. But Gavin is as laid-back and handsome as everyone else at the Roebuck: tall and blue-eyed, with a well-trimmed goatee and thin moustache that are so blond that they seem to be painted onto his deeply tanned face.
In fact, Mark and Gavin aren’t regulars at all. The Roebuck is just a stopover between isolated cattle properties where the two men do odd jobs for a traveling contractor. They get these breaks about once a month, for a few days at the most. And this one is due to end at midnight, when their boss arrives to carry them off to the next remote station.
“One
for the road!” Mark yells at the barmaid. Then, giggling, “Two for the road!”
Gavin joins the chorus. “Ten for the road—”
“Twenty—”
“Twenty thousand!”
The barmaid smiles tolerantly. “They’ve been going on like this since yesterday afternoon,” she says to me in a stage whisper. “You’d think they were drunk.”
Getting drunk was originally a secondary mission. Mark wanted to score some grass for the long nights out in the scrub. Gavin just wanted some female companionship.
I’ve been out of circulation for six months,” he says. “It’s depressing.” Unfortunately, he hasn’t had any more luck than Mark.
“Empty-handed,” he says. “Until tomorrow night. Then I’ll have you-know-what in my hand again.”
Mark laughs. “If I wank anymore, my dong will fall off.”
The barmaid returns with three beers. “My shout,” she says.
“I’d like to shout you something,” Gavin says, leaning over the bar. “What’s wrong, is it me or my face?”
“Face is fine,” she says. “Too desperate, that’s all.” She turns and sashays down the bar, leaving Gavin with his face on his arms, moaning.
Mark checks his watch. “Three hours to go, mate. This is looking serious.”
“Back to work.”
“Back to the bush.”
“No girls.”
“No dope.”
“No nothing.”
They collapse against the bar and I can’t tell if they’re giggling or whimpering. Probably both.
I ask them why they don’t quit their jobs. Mark tells me that he will as soon as he’s saved enough money to go back to Melbourne. “I had this delusion that I’d make my fortune swinging a pickaxe somewhere out West.” Gavin suffered from a different fantasy. His catering business in Perth went bust, then his marriage did the same. He figured a few months of hard labor in the bush would “set the boat straight again.”
