Eleven weeks in

It’s like this: one minute you’re at your desk wearing massive earmuff headphones and agonizing over someone’s consonants, and the next you’re out in the bush a hundred miles from anywhere leaping off the hood of a Land Rover with the staff of the Museum of Australian Democracy. Two and a half months in, I have to say I like it here.

This week makes my eleventh in Port Hedland, my fifth in my new house, and, thanks to the recent hire of Full-time Linguist Number 3, my last as the newest staff member at work. It’s been a very active eleven weeks, as there’s a surprising amount going on in this town if you’re willing to try anything, which I believe I may have a history of being. I’ve been to events hosted by the rec center, the library, the historical society, and the gardening club; I joined in on an impromptu half marathon, started a running club, joined a team for the 24-hour Relay for Life cancer research run, and am apparently going to soon be hosting a monthly swing and salsa night.

I even spent a weekend at the horse races in Marble Bar, a tiny speck of a desert village about two hours inland from here that boasts a couple hundred residents and the dubious distinction of being (supposedly) Australia’s hottest town, deemed as such because at some point in the not-so-distant past it recorded 161 consecutive days in which the temperature never dropped below 100^o.

I rode down there and camped with a lady I met at the half marathon, plus her friends, whom I met for the first time when we all got in the car together—a motley crew of very sunburned middle aged mining employees and cohorts, all of whom liked their whiskey and most of whom liked it for breakfast.

While Port Hedland is not exactly a destination spot for touring artists, I also got to see a traveling circus that passed through town, though I spent the whole show wincing as families of slightly overweight acrobats performed creepily Oedipal poses and lifts on each other with noticeable effort. Other than that, we don’t get much in the way of shows up here; the cultural centre has movie nights sometimes, but they’re usually about Justin Bieber and the entry fees are somewhere north of $15 a person, so I don’t anticipate stopping by there. Even with a join-all spirit I still have to have some standards.

The town itself, though, has proven to be a surprisingly agreeable place for joining and launching various activities. It’s large and active enough to have a decent array of things going on, and has a big enough population (somewhere between 15 and 20,000) to support groups and events, but it’s still small enough so that new activities seem to make a big impact. Like my new running club, for example: it’s the only one in the area, and its founding actually made it into the newspaper (i.e., small town), but I think at least a few people are quite keen to join (i.e., it’s large and active enough). It’s a funny little place. I actually quite like it.

But of course, I spend most of my time at work, and I’m happy to report that I really like my job too. I like my coworkers, who are intelligent and have good senses of humor—my boss once acted out what it might be like to slap me with a fish. I like the building—it’s quiet and full of light and has a ton of usable outdoor space. I like the people it connects me with—I’ve met some highly respected Aboriginal elders, as well as local leaders in both Aboriginal affairs and general town activities (not to mention the staff of the Museum of Australian Democracy, with whom I leaped from the hood of the Land Rover. Our organizations are collaborating on a traveling photography exhibit on the Aboriginal political history of the Pilbara region, and they came from Canberra for a visit a few weeks ago. I accompanied them on day trips out to two semi-remote communities and discovered along the way that they have a fabulous sense of fun.

And finally, in other exciting news, I have internet at home now! The cell phone provider up here (there’s only one) also offers little USB stick modems on which you pay by the kilobyte. Service is pretty decent if often a bit slow, but I’ve found that it reasonably fulfills the main purpose for which I bought it, which is the making of internet-based phone calls. Assuming a patient interlocutor in a quiet environment who doesn’t mind repeating things three or four times, it’s quite sufficient, and since obtaining it I’ve been calling Americans with gleeful abandon. If you haven’t yet received a staticky 8am phone call from Australia, then let this be your warning—you could be next! (Hint: say “Hello?” at least five times before hanging up. Sometimes the Pacific gets in the way.)

Between work, other various activities, and a longstanding penchant for procrastination, it takes me a while to get these posts up—but I’ll aim for another one within the next few weeks! Affection to all from down under!

Amanda in Australia?

I suppose I really am going to have to rename the blog this time! The following post was written over the course of several days last week.

Because the humor of coming to work in Australia and being put up in a prison was not lost on me, I was briefly disappointed to learn that I was not, in fact, going to be living at Port Hedland’s ex-detention center.

While some visitors to this remote northwestern corner of the country apparently do have the pleasure of staying in the repurposed jail (which, I was told, the government retains the right to de-repurpose at any time), I have instead been given three weeks’ accommodation at the somewhat euphemistically-named Port Haven Village, a miners’ camp encircled in wire fencing at the edge of the city airfield.

Actually, it’s nicer than it sounds. The camp must be almost brand new; I don’t know exactly when it was built, but my room looks like it’s hardly ever been touched before.
It, like all the others, is also surprisingly well-appointed: each single-occupancy bedroom comes complete with a mini fridge, electric kettle, flat screen TV, and even an itty bitty in-room bath with a complimentary bar of soap. (I tried to upload a video, but since it didn't upload in the 18 hours I let it sit, I think it's just not happening.)

Likewise, the camp itself is nearly all-inclusive. For better or worse, it was clearly constructed with the idea that the miners, most of whom are fly-in, fly-out workers from less desolate parts of the country, should never have to interact with or even see the local area at all. There’s a dining hall and a bar (the unappetizingly-labeled “dry mess” and “wet mess”); a small gym with coaches and fitness classes; a pool; a miniature Astroturf cricket field encased in netting on all sides, including the top; a shop carrying candy, emu jerky, and toiletries; multiple laundry facilities; a couple barbecue grills; and, though I don’t know what you’d really do with them, two holes of putt-putt. I imagine it’s quite like living on a military base, complete with street names that are clearly trying too hard to convince you of something, like Opportunity Way and Prosperity Road.

If the miners’ camp has exceeded my (low, though quite amicably so) expectations, though, the city of Perth, 800 miles south of here and where I began my Australian adventure, did so even more. I arrived in that city, the capital of the unassuming Western Australia State, on the afternoon of May 12, after having left Knoxville two days prior. On my antipodean journey, I’d stopped off in Chicago in the early evening, paused in Los Angeles after dark, and then outrun the sun all the way across the Pacific for a 17-hour night that ended with sunrise over Sydney. And finally, after passing my first Australian morning and afternoon in alternating states of fidgetiness and narcolepsy, I descended from a flawless blue sky and into the opalescent little city of Perth.

My first impression of the city, gained blearily from the airport shuttle bus window after falling asleep at the bus stop and almost not waking up upon the bus’s arrival, was of a network of busy, dusty roadways connecting a decent but rather uninspiring collection of shops, apartments, and American fast food joints. I wrote an email that night comparing it to Fresno, a city I’ve never seen but which I imagine to have a similarly anemic ambience, though at triple the size.

Well, I take it back. It was clearly meant as an insult, and I hereby retract it (though my completely unfounded distaste for Fresno still stands). Perhaps it was because I was in a stupor, or because my vision was as blurred as if I’d spent all night in the library. Perhaps it was because my diet for the past two days had consisted largely of airplane-issued cookies and bland mushy things slathered in the requisite British Commonwealth scoop of butter. But whatever the cause, when I awoke at 4:30 the next morning and ventured out into Perth, I was immediately struck by the plain agreeableness of this clean, safe, palm-treed, well-functioning, and calmly congenial city.
I had breakfast at a café tucked down a little alley, and then walked along the spotlessly-maintained riverfront pedestrian path for miles until reaching the University of Western Australia, where I enjoyed a pleasant lunch with an equally affable quartet of sandal-clad linguistics professors. I spent the ensuing afternoon in a delightfully perfect park overlooking the city (the view is pictured to the right--and the crooked horizon is due to its being upside down on the bottom of the earth, not due to the photographer, I'll have you know). I then had dinner at a swanky Indian joint right on the water where the dishes were priced, amazingly, at “whatever your heart feels” (a tricky sociological experiment indeed, as I’m pretty sure I overpaid).

The next day, Saturday, was much cooler and looked imminently stormy, so I was glad to be back at the airport after another pleasant café breakfast. While checking in, I considered my choice of seat on the airplane carefully, as I was determined to see my new country from the air on this seminal flight. I even sacrificed the exit row for the last remaining window seat.

That seat, unfortunately, ended up being right next to the propeller, which completely blocked the window. Perhaps even worse, it was also right across the aisle from an obese man who vomited the entire time. So though there was nothing to be seen out my window, I spent the three-hour flight with my head turned sharply toward it nonetheless, intently studying the side of the propeller housing.

And then I landed at the Port Hedland airport (see photo on left for the border between the airport and the miner's camp). It's a tiny facility where passengers and everyone else mill around together in one room and my new co-worker, Jess, somehow recognized me though I’d never sent a photo. Perhaps she’d Googled.

For my celebratory arrival dinner, Jess took me to a place she proclaimed as one of the most exciting dining options in the area: the mess hall at the miner’s camp where I’m living. As she explained, the whole office staff had taken a dinner outing together there the week before and had apparently come away immensely excited, as they’d grown quite tired of the other five options in town. And it was indeed good, and much more worldly than I would have expected from a cafeteria serving an outpost of burly men, boasting such delicacies as stir-fried tofu and grilled barramundi and baba ghanouj. At twenty-two dollars a meal, though (even for breakfast!), it’ll require more than some pureed eggplant to convince me (though I’ve since discovered that $22 is actually on the cheap side for a restaurant meal here—on my one off-camp restaurant outing, I had a $30 all-vegetable salad).

The next day, Sunday, I went to the art museum (which is, to its credit, really making the best of the ten pieces it’s got, all from Perth-based artists) with Nick, a short, gray-haired, chain-smoking, constantly-swearing, raspy-voiced and generous-natured female linguist from Melbourne who’s been filling in at the language centre while they’ve been waiting for me and who, as a fellow Port Haven resident, has been my guide and extraordinarily helpful chauffeur. (She’s leaving in a week, though, which means that I have precisely that long to a.) obtain a car, b.) learn how to drive it, as it will be a manual transmission, and c.) remember to keep it on the left side of the road.)

And then the following day was Monday: my first day of work. The photo below depicts our parking lot, company car, and some of the area behind the office--which is at the heart of town, mind you. Without laboring the details, I’ll say that it’s been really great so far. (I got to develop a brand new file-naming protocol for the office! No, actually, it’s really exciting. Posterity and archivists alike will hopefully be pleased, and I tell you I surely am.) I’ve also been tasked with putting the finishing touches on two illustrated, audio-accompanied wordlists before the funder’s big deadline in June. One of these lists will require traveling “out bush” to track down some of the three or four remaining speakers of the Thalanyji language in order to make additional recordings, probably sometime within the next week or two—so I’ll get to see some of the real outback pretty soon (I’ve heard they’ll roast you a kangaroo!).

Otherwise, all is quite well here! Traveling apparently wore me out even more than I originally thought, as I’ve been a somewhat sick with a low fever and sore throat since Sunday, and even had to miss work because of it on Thursday. I also had an allergic reaction to the chinstrap on my new sunhat, which resulted in an irritatingly itchy rash on my neck, and, if that weren’t enough, also redeveloped the same sort of non-itchy but nevertheless unsightly welts on my face (egads) as I did upon deplaning in Indonesia last year. Sigh. Perhaps I’m also allergic to the eastern hemisphere. In any case, it appears my immune system is a bit compromised. I’m hoping my lymph nodes will stop expanding before they actually pass my ears. But all things considered, I’m actually feeling quite well and have every hope of being in top form by next week. Which is when I’ll write to you all again!

Props to anyone who’s made it this far. I miss you all and send good thoughts from down under!!