CAMERON THOMPSON continues his series of Summer Reading pieces.
Labouring jobs always get a bum rap, but they aren’t the same today as they once were. Time and again we’re told of new advances in working conditions, with a host of laws, agencies and self-regulatory schemes to protect workers and make workplaces safe. It’s good news, but all this harping on about safety irritates the hell out of me.
Look again at those ancient pictures of workers building skyscrapers in Manhattan. They were balanced on beams, casually eating from lunch boxes. A hundred or two hundred metres in the air with no sign of a safety harness, did they look unhappy? Did any of them hold up a sign saying ‘get me out of here’ or ‘save me from this crazy workplace’?
No. Most seemed content. Some were smiling. You’d wonder, after a week spent working just millimetres from the edge of the abyss, what those guys did at weekends.
It is an unpopular thing to say, but risk-taking is fun. Some people really do like a workplace without handrails. Sometimes having three points of contact sounds like the sort of advice you’d keep for your grandma.
One of my first jobs as a teenager was roof tiling. Peter Bauer was a great boss and we got on well. We’d use a conveyor to lift tiles in stacks of four from down at ground level. Up top, we’d collect two of these stacks and carry eight at a time to load the roof with tiles in preparation for laying.
That was very tricky, because it was a high wire act to carry 35kg of tiles on your shoulder across a roof you hadn’t built yet. We’d need dozens of these stacks over a hundred square metres of roof. To avoid a fall, you’d need to walk on the roof battens, but they were hidden from view under a shiny silver sheet of insulating foil.
I’m not sure which was worse – falling through the battens or astride them.
I’ll admit I didn’t have Peter’s nuggetty frame, so I didn’t last long.
Another job was with John the plumber at Dysart, a mining town, accessed via a dirt track from a remote, one-lane strip of bitumen, the Dingo – Mt Flora beef road.
Roofing a house with colorbond began with standing the sheets against the house and handing them up, one at a time (my job). Above, John would lift them into place and use an electric gun to place a single screw in the top corner of each.
Compared to tiling, colorbond made installing a roof a quick, efficient one-day process. One afternoon we had sheets standing all around a house when a storm blew up. It came from out of nowhere and our first warning was the sudden, explosive sound of lightning bolts smacking down among the trees across the other side of town.
With so many sheets already standing, we didn’t hesitate, but began handing them up and screwing them down just as fast as we could. The lightning came on real quick, and across the street, a horse in a float kicked the thing to pieces in a panic. The owner tried desperately to free it while we worked on.
In the end, the rain caught up with the lightning. It came in huge drops when we had maybe five sheets to go. John kept going with his 240V screw gun and the lightning all around. At last the sky opened up for real.
Finally the last screw went home. The gun came flying through the air, near to where I was standing and I swear that John, soaked right through, beat it to the ground.
At Christmas, we went home for a break with our families at the coast. While we were away, a cyclone dumped maybe half a metre of water on the area. The Isaacs River came up, and when I returned, the dirt access track was transformed into a moonscape of huge sand dunes and literally millions of kangaroos.
I was hitching a ride back to work with the company foreman in a truck carrying ready-to-install kitchens and in the truck’s headlights, we looked out on an actual sea of roos.
They say that in a drought roos can delay the delivery of their young until conditions are good. Out there, after that flood, every roo must have contributed, because the roos we encountered were everywhere. It was like a plague of the creatures and across the landscape, they were too tightly packed and moving too quickly in their usual random way to avoid us. As the truck roared, plunged and staggered up and down those crazy trackless dunes, the roos bounced off the bumper, one after another, two and three at a time.
Back in Dysart, while the local shire went to work on the access road, we heard that the company boilermaker had a problem. He’d delayed his departure on Christmas eve while repairing a truck long into the night. Then, when he did leave, he got lost in the rain, abandoned his car in the mire and was rescued by a farmer on a tractor.
The car was a beautiful metal flake gold Valiant Pacer, with a luxurious custom interior that had cost him a fortune.
The following Saturday, John, the boiler-maker and I were given an early mark about 4pm and set out to find it.
We knew it would be a mission, because the car had crossed right over the beef road in the rain and was thought to be somewhere west of the Isaacs River crossing.
Most of the properties in the area had been evacuated. Confronted by a vast marshland east of the beef road, we were diverted almost immediately.
Following some shooters, we wound up at a homestead on a relatively high piece of ground. There the sandflies were so bad that the residents took the extraordinary step of covering their exposed skin with diesel. Standing there, we had sandflies going in our ears, eyes, mouths and noses, so we quickly donned some diesel of our own. It wasn’t pleasant stinking of diesel, but it was better than putting up with the sandflies.
In the circumstances, those folk were incredibly helpful. They put us up in an abandoned caravan, parked at a precarious angle on the property rubbish tip and I doubt I have had a more uncomfortable night.
But in the morning, they helped us through their back fence to find a way around the bog and our search resumed.
The three of us and two dogs, a wolfhound and a pit-bull, were traveling in John’s old tray-back Landcruiser. We didn’t have much by way of specialised off-roading gear, so from time to time, we had to cut through logs with a carpenter’s saw.
Anyway, our dilemma – wondering how we were going to retrieve a Valiant with lowered suspension in those conditions – deepened about lunch time when we came around a corner to find our way blocked by the Isaacs River itself. This was significant because we had thought the missing car was west of the Isaacs and clearly it was not.
Next, in an effort to cross the river, our Toyota got stuck on the boggy eastern bank and we proceeded to walk. We found the Valiant about a kilometre or two up the road, but that car was going nowhere. It was full of mud. Two hours later, there was a turn-off and a sign indicating a cattle station to our left. We never found the station, but we did find a lonely land-rover sitting in the middle of an airstrip.
What a godsend! It ran OK and took us back to the Toyota. Once it was extracted from the muddy riverbank, we hooked on to the Valiant. Being east of the river meant we could return to Dysart by much better roads, and this we did.
The journey wasn’t much fun. I did two stints in the stinking muddy driver’s seat of the Pacer. Ahead of me, the laminated windscreen was smashed as rocks kicked up by the dragging tow-rope pulverised it one bulls-eye at a time. The golden bonnet and the Valiant radiator copped much the same treatment.
Anyway, the tiring journey ended about 9pm, when we hauled the wreckage into Dysart. Waving from the Landcruiser, we took the Valiant on a triumphant town tour, accompanied by honking horns and derisive hoots from our beer-drinking workmates in their various caravans.
The next day was Monday, and we were back at work at 8am.
* Cameron Thompson is an Editorial Coordinator for the Today Group, based in Ipswich, Queensland. He has worked as a journalist since 1981, in Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Brisbane, Melbourne, Longreach and Darwin. In politics, he was the Federal MP for Blair for nine years but served also as a speechwriter and policy adviser to the Queensland Treasurer and as a policy writer and media adviser in portfolios as diverse as Health, Education, the Arts and Attorney General in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
