Still Moving

Journal: 084

Milly and Melanie/GTL have both recently bought new homes and are both still in the process of moving. Melanie, I think, is getting the interior painted – ‘Dorian Gray’. We are not sure if that will make her younger, or the house – and Milly has a new dog-friendly floor, finished yesterday I think, I haven’t seen it yet.

Milly also has workmen in getting her old cottage ready to sell, though there are still painting jobs left for me. And then there’s daughter Gee who earlier this year bought a sea-change property 450 km south and who hopefully will take the bigger pieces of family furniture.

Time to think of housewarming presents.

Melanie, you’re getting flowers. When I was little, mum and dad – dad was nearly always the gardener – had a very English garden, stocks, pansies, hollyhocks, sweet peas, and the big green shrubby one with blue flowers whose name has gone out of my head (hydrangeas); partly because the southern, wetter parts of Victoria – Gippsland and the Western District – have sadly had their landscapes cleared of gums and been Englishified with pines and willows; and partly because that’s how dad’s mum gardened. Anyway, ever since, pansies have been one of my favourite flowers.

I was an ignorant young husband, but after we separated the first time, I got into the habit of bringing Milly flowers when I visited – Lilliums, sunflowers and sweet william (of course). Coming home from north Queensland, to Melbourne, I often passed through fields of sunflowers, and one time I stopped long enough to pick a bucketfull from the side of the road. I’m sure they are a common sight in the Mid West, but Melanie have some more, from me.

I’m afraid I’m ignorant enough of Australian flowers to have no idea what would survive outside your new farmhouse, but I think Melanie, you mentioned one time African violets for your kitchen window. My mum for as long as I can remember has had one or two cyclamens on her windowsill above the sink. When I said yesterday to Milly that I thought cyclamens and African violets were the same thing, she looked at me, as she often does, with unbelieving scorn. I toss a coin and it comes up cyclamens.

The image is from the Alpine Garden Society, Victoria (here), so they might even grow outside.

As I write, it’s Friday and I should be on my way to Melbourne for mum’s birthday, but there’s no freight on the computer and Dragan on whom I was relying has come up with nothing. On Monday I’ll double up my trailers and go over empty.

AWWC March 2022

Date		Contributor	Title
Wed	02	Elizabeth Lhuede	Suffering, resistance and resilience
Fri	04	EL	Jack Rugby, “Betty Pops the Question” (short story)
Wed	09	Jonathan Shaw	Zora Cross
Fri	11	EL	Bernice May, Impressions of Some Writing Women (nonfiction extract) (Bernice May is a penname for Zora Cross)
Wed	16	Bill Holloway	David Adams ed., The Letters of Rachel Henning (review)
Fri	18	EL	Rachel Henning Writes from Exmoor (nonfiction extract)
Wed	23	Stacey Roberts	Exploring the AWWC Archives
Fri	25	EL	Mrs Francis Vidal, Tales For the Bush 1 (short story)
Wed	30	Whispering Gums	Early Australian women writers, 2: Secondary sources

Multitasking

Journal: 083

Ok, I’m home. Before my most recent trip I let Melanie/GTL know that I was “dropping behind” with my posts and might be off the radar for a while -which indeed I was – and she wrote back, “Posts don’t have to be hard. If you take some photos, including ones of yourself, you can just share those and say they’re from a trip when you went from Perth to wherever. Sometimes it’s nice to just see someone.”

Well, I don’t do selfies and no one seems to have captured me anytime this year, so we’ll just have to make do with my truck.

This is how my week went. I get most of my work from two carriers, Sam & Dragan being one, and Anthony, who specializes in heavy haulage within WA being the other. The previous week I pulled a triple for Dragan, grossing 100 tonne which was a bit hard on the truck, so last week I accepted a load from Anthony. He made up a B double load for me in his yard and on Sunday morning I just had to chain it down and I was away. On Monday afternoon I met one of his trucks in Pt Hedland and transferred the load to him (it was all driveable machinery). And the fun began.

My first assignment was to move a machine from Iron Bridge to Eliwana, both FMG mines. Iron Bridge, 100 kms south of Pt Hedland and 50 km of dirt roads inland I’d been to once before. I rolled up in the morning, spent two hours dealing with my vaccination passport – which the federal government had sent me and which FMG deemed insufficient – took both trailers into the mine and up a very steep incline, spent another two hours loading and bringing them down one at a time (having all the weight on the back trailer would have caused them to slide in the gravel and jackknife), returned to the highway and by late afternoon was another 100 km south at Munjina roadhouse (Auski).

Eliwana was somewhere west of me but no one could give me directions. Eventually I got Anthony’s senior driver on the phone, was told to head past Wittenoom, past Solomon mine to the turnoff for Solomon airport and then just follow my nose for 130 kms, all dirt, and the nearest town and for all I knew the nearest phone tower, hundreds of kms distant.

I stopped on the edge of the road outside Solomon and got enough signal to edit that night’s post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge; saw that a scrub fire was burning some kms behind me and decided to move on; almost took a wrong turn averted at the last minute by a frantic call to Anthony’s driver, both of us on one bar; pulled up through the spectacular Hammersly Gorge and came to Solomon airport (all mines have their own airport) where at last I could sleep.

In the morning I pulled into an outpost of the mine, dropped my empty front trailer (top picture) and got directions. As it turned out, the next 130 kms followed the FMG rail line; the Eliwana gatehouse waved me through with the briefest glance at my “passport”; and by late afternoon I was back at Munjina.

Assignment 2 was to make my way 800 kms south and then inland another 150 kms mostly dirt to do two B double loads out of Penny West gold mine – no, I’d never heard of it either – one to Mt Magnet and one to Perth. For once I had excellent directions from Mt Magnet to Penny West (46.5 km east on bitumen, turn right Challa Station, 82.5 km south, turn right 1.7 km … 26 km past Youanmi mine).

I got back to Mt Magnet at 4.00 pm (by now it’s Thurs), with permission to unload on night shift. Advised Anthony – home in bed with Coivd – that I was on my way back to Penny West and he said “it’s cancelled”. He asked me to do a different load on Friday from another mine in a different part of the bush and I said no. I was hot from an endless succession of 38 deg days, dirty, covered in as much red dust as my equipment, and tired from rushing from one job to the next.

I contrived to get cleaned up, got into Perth midday Friday, picked up my other trailer which was getting some work done, and by tea time was at Milly’s with Mr 11, Ms 10 and Mr 2. We got Mr 2 settled – thanks mostly to his sister – and at 6am this morning I was back, ready for pancake duty, while Milly got on with Red Cross work.

In the middle of all that – all these dirt roads, rush jobs and dodgy internet connections – I was corresponding with the “junior publicist” at Melbourne University Press with regards to Nathan Hobby’s upcoming KSP biography. I had an extract prepared, from Nathan’s PhD thesis, to run on the AWWC site for which as you know, I am the editor of guest contributions. JP’s final word was, “We currently have publicity procedures and agreements in place for this title blah blah”. So that’s one spot I’ll have to find something else for, and if she continues not to send me a review copy (and the first reviews are already out) then that will be two. I’m guessing lit.bloggers are not serious enough for the new, serious MUP.

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Recent audiobooks 

Rosalie Ham (F, Aus/Vic), The Dressmaker’s Secret (2020) – deserves a review. Over the top in what seems to be true Ham style. Thoroughly enjoyable Hist.Fic. (but boy! am I getting sick of Caroline Lee)
Salman Rushdie (M, Eng), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)
Tao Lin (M, USA), Taipei (2013)
Clementine Ford (F, Aust/Vic), Fight Like a Girl (2016) – NF (another I enjoyed and should review)
Ian McEwan (M, Eng), Machines Like Me (2019) – Mediocre SF
John Banville (M, Ire), The Sea (2005)
Hans Rosenfeldt (M, Swe), Cry Wolf (2021) – Crime (more Scandanavian noir, set interestingly on Sweden’s border with Finland, but with too much blood and too obviously written by a movie script writer).

Currently Reading:

Doris Lessing (F, Eng), Shikasta (1981) – SF (Still! It’s slow going)
Madelaine Ryan (F, Aus/Vic), A Room Called Earth (2020) – review coming.

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The map is of course from Google Maps, I didn’t mean to crop their logo. To give you an idea of scale, Perth to Pt Hedland is 1,600 km.

FMG is Fortescue Metals Group, now Australia’s third largest iron ore miner after Andrew Forrest finally managed to launch a winner on the stockmarket (and is now of course considered an oracle on all things to do with anything).

KSP Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883 – 1969). Australian author