Covid-19, Testing, Testing

Journal: 054

Why have I commenced with three naked women? Because I can? Maybe. Or because WG and I and Neil@ Kallaroo diverted ourselves in the Comments on a recent Monday Musings to a discussion of old time SF covers and naked women in bubble helmets. A quick survey of my shelves brought up these just in the Vs and Ws but not any bubble helmets, and in fact I would say the majority of my 1960s and 70s covers were space ships, as below.

So, does this presage a change in direction of my reviewing. In short, no. I’ve been blogging more than five years without exhausting my stocks of pre-War Australian women writers, and with judicious up-topping will easily manage another five. To even make a dent in my shelves of SF would take me another lifetime.

But to the matter at hand. I am home, in Perth. Let us put up a truck pic and restart.

When last we spoke I was masked up in Melbourne, loading for home, looking forward with some trepidation to crossing from Victoria into SA and more particularly from SA into WA. I loaded three trailers with steel, topped up with cars and set out once more, on Thursday, up through the Mallee to Ouyen and into SA at Pinnaroo. SA require drivers to obtain an entry permit on line. I’d submitted an application but been refused. I complained. Two very nice clerks from SAPol phoned me separately to get me going. Turns out my permit for my previous trip was valid for six months. Problem solved.

The WA border was just as easy. In the two or three weeks since my last crossing WA had instituted an online permit called G2G, presumably Good to Go. I got one. The policeman at the border – police people are so young these days – scanned my phone with his phone, issued me stern instructions to get a virus test within 48 hours of that minute, 9pm Friday, and another on the eleventh day – I was given a chart showing that the eleventh day after a Friday is a Tuesday – on pain of a $50,000 fine.

I forgot to say I’m not allowed in SA without a test every seven days. Seems to me the chances of WA’s eleventh day and SA’s seventh day being the same day are pretty slim.

I had my 48 hour test this afternoon (Sunday) at Royal Perth where I was met at the door – separate from the main door of course – by two preliminary surveyors, passed on to a receptionist who took down much the same info and then after a short wait, to a serious senior woman, nurse or doctor I don’t know, who was at some pains to discuss my situation, the situation of truck drivers in general, and to explain the procedure – swabs from the back of my throat and from each nostril. It’s meant to be uncomfortable rather than painful but the back of my nose was still stinging an hour later.

I had been concerned that if I was ever going to get infected it would be in a waiting room full of people waiting to be tested, but as I should have guessed from WA’s usual daily zero cases, I was the only customer.

Homer, the friendly manager of the transport company I load out of Melbourne for, has a new client and wants me to do the first load from Perth to Melbourne (probably because his own drivers refused). I’m loading one trailer tomorrow just as soon as I can get it unloaded and I think I’m expected in Melbourne Friday. I hope he’s not reading this because I can’t get away early enough to be there before the following Monday.

The big problem of course is that as of last night Victoria has declared a ‘State of Disaster’ and tomorrow will start closing businesses. I can always unload at the transport depot if the client is unable to receive me, but will I then find a load home? And having loaded will SA let me transit, will WA let me back in?

Tune in this time in ten days for the next exciting episode. Chicken Man! (oops, sorry, wrong promo).

Covid-19, the Second Wave

Journal: 053

All masked up in Melbourne. I didn’t know selfies were reversed, which you can tell, well I can, by the name on the truck behind me. Melbourne is up to 500 new Covid cases a day, the rest of Australia maybe 20. Melbourne is in lockdown while Sydney partys. They’ll get theirs.

I set out on this current trip last Thursday. The Victorian government had already made masks mandatory in Melbourne, but the big new development (for me) is WA’s announcement that drivers from Melbourne and Sydney will be tested for Covid at the border and not allowed to proceed until the test results are returned a couple of days later. I’m not sure how this is going to work, there’s no where to park on the WA side of the border until Mundrabilla roadhouse, nearly 100 km further on (and it’s illegal to carry fresh food with you!). I’m hoping we’ll be allowed to proceed to Norseman, another 600 km and the first town on the WA side of the Nullarbor. I should be there by Friday, I’ll let you know what happens.

All small beer compared with the preparations for civil war in the US. Trump’s troops trained to fanaticism on the southern border, Black Water mercenaries, US Marine wannabees and dropouts, airlifted into Democrat controlled cities, ostensibly to control anarchist protesters (and moms) but really to intimidate POC/workers attempting to vote in person in November – 98 days to go. Republicans mobilising tens of thousands of “poll watchers”, reinforced by ex-Navy Seals, in support, the defence forces hopefully lining up with the government but police forces – looking at you Seattle – showing signs of swinging the other way.

Trump you’ll notice is barely campaigning, he obviously believes he doesn’t have to. And then there’s Facebook and Russia. Meanwhile Covid-19 is a firestorm raging through the populations of the USA and all the other poor or poorly managed nations (I read somewhere that the US is a third world nation with a very rich plutocracy and a shrinking and increasingly irrelevant middle class).

I follow Trump news on the internet obsessively. Obviously! And it struck me as I began to write this in the few hours before I go out to load home just how much has changed in the two weeks since the last Journal. One word – Portland. I really hope that in another two weeks I’m just another crazed conspiracy theorist. And I really, really hope that by my 70th in March it is all over – Trump, Covid-19, Recession. Don’t like my chances.

What else have I been doing? I was nearly at the end of my 14 days quarantine in Perth when a very nicely paying road train load came together, even when one customer cancelled another popped up straight away. I took my time and toddled over to Victoria, arrived at the weekend, unloaded Sunday/Monday and here I am, masked up in the truckstop, after a big vegie breakfast, waiting for Homer to call me back with my first pickup.

I finished listening to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) – from Proj. Gutenberg with one very pleasant reader – I’m sure it’s a standard in American Lit classes but I had no expectations and boy, the ending comes as a shock.

Then a standard US murder mystery thriller, and a short, very well written memoir by [I’ll look this name up when I get back in the truck, Annie Ernaux] a French woman writing about her mother’s descent into Alzheimers. The most interesting bit for me was her writing about writing.

Now I’m in the middle of Jasper Fffforde’s Shades of Grey, an amusing take on steampunk SF. The young male protagonist is surrounded by marriage prospects and what I’ve been thinking about most – goes off to load…

that’s one trailer done. Two to go.

… is the sort of girl or woman I find attractive in books (and in life, as it happens). It’s nearly always the bright, annoying one on the edge of the crowd at school, and the lead guy’s friend, not girlfriend – Jamie Lee Curtis and not Elle Macpherson, though the one that really springs to mind is Roseanne’s second daughter. The reason’s obvious when you think about it, who is more likely to write books, the outsider or the prom queen? So I’m pretty sure the permanently angry working class (‘grey’) girl who is seemingly trying to kill the hero will be the one he ends up with.

Ok, I’ve got another trailer to load. More anon.

In Quarantine, Again

Journal: 052

Yes, I’m back in quarantine. The Covid-19 blow-up in Victoria has caught up with me. No, I’m not ill, but the understandable response of the other states has been to allow truck drivers from Victoria to drive and unload etc., but to otherwise be isolated.

Here are some figures, those for Indiana, USA and Birmingham, UK are for our friends Melanie (GTL) and Liz (Adventures in Reading etc..)

Victoria (pop. 6.5m)       New cases/deaths: 273/1   Total: 3,799/24 (source)
Rest of Aust. (pop. 19m)   New cases/deaths: 6/0    Total: 6,000/84
Indiana (pop. 6.7m)         New cases/deaths: 793/8  Total: 51,079/2,563 (source)
Birmingham (pop. 4.3m) New cases/deaths: ?/4     Total:  ?/3,145 (source)

Of course the situations in USA and UK are an ongoing, unmitigated disaster, as they also seem to be in Brazil, India and sub-Saharan Africa, though the Australian media don’t pay them much attention. I’ve commented before that we are living in an age that confirms the prescience of Science Fiction. This trip I listened to Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos (1985) about the future of the human race after a bug wipes out everyone except some castaways on a Galapagos island.

Science fact rather than science fiction. No-one seems to remember David Suzuki any more. Remember he said 30 years ago that it was simple mathematics that with the population of the world doubling every few decades, from 1 bil. to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, we would very quickly get to a level the planet was unable to support. Well, now we are there. Yes, we can still theoretically grow enough food, but population densities and mobility are now such that the spread of new viruses is becoming uncontainable. I thought I might be dead before the inevitable Malthusian implosion, but seems not.

It would have been interesting if the virus had come in a non-election year, because I think that the forces of reason, such as they are in the US, may have overthrown the president and attempted to contain the spread. But of course the forces of reason may in turn have been overthrown by the forces of naked capitalism, as indeed they have.

What I really meant to write, before I started running around crying ‘the end of the world is nigh’ (I have a white beard, I really should let it flow) is that 8 or 9 days ago, after a couple of weeks home and getting some work done on the truck, a customer popped up with a B Double load to Victoria, involving a detour to a farm down south which is my excuse for the photo above (it’s a Fargo, from the 1950s, and still a goer).

My delivery was to Leongatha in fertile, hilly Gippsland east of Melbourne where – speaking of ‘home’, as my last Journal did – we lived for five years in the 1950s, out past the milk factory which I used to see (and smell) across the paddocks from our little row of housing commission weatherboards down a gravel lane, and now surrounded by light industry. The paddocks so shockingly green after the mallee and desert country I’m used to.

My mate Homer who has loaded me out every trip for 15 months now since Dragan left me stranded in Melbourne on my first trip with my own trailers, was ready for me and I was in Melbourne for not much more than 24 hours before I was on my way home again. I was expecting trouble at the SA border (Yamba, near Renmark) and had been keeping a log of my contacts in Victoria, as required. That was ok but they also needed me to log onto SAPol and generate an entry number. Tedious at 10 o’clock at night, but soon done.

Twenty four hours later I was at the WA border, which had had the most formal entry requirements right from the beginning. An apologetic policeman told me that the rules had changed even as he was coming onto this shift and that as I was coming from Victoria he was obliged to put me under conditional quarantine. I, and he, signed some papers and then he requested that I photograph them as he had no copies.

I was to travel straight home by the most direct route, and there I must stay for 14 days unless “conducting authorised business as a specialist within your scope of work.” Apparently, I am permitted to leave if the house catches fire, but I must stay nearby and return as soon as possible. It was about 2 deg C in the middle of the night in mid winter on the cliffs above the Southern Ocean, though briefly not raining, as the poor bugger read all this out to me.

Now it’s Sunday, I’m home. Milly came round yesterday afternoon before I arrived and stocked me up with much better provisions than I would buy myself, to make up for the fact I guess, that if I continue running to Victoria it might be some months before I can go round to her place for dinner, let alone take her out.

This afternoon I will catch up on the Indigenous Lit Week posts I have missed (most of them), start writing up one of my own (Tues or Weds I hope, Lisa), catch up with the rest of you, do my EOFY bookwork (just joking, though I’d better do my end of quarter GST), tomorrow I will unload and Friday, I hope, I will be on my way again.

 

Recent audiobooks 

Kurt Vonnegut (M, USA), Galapagos (1985) – SF
David Quammen (M, USA), The Soul of Viktor Tronko (1987)
Peter Temple (M, Aust/Vic), The Broken Shore (2005) – Crime
Chevy Stevens (F, Can), That Night (2014) – Crime
JD Robb (F, USA), Kindred in Death (2009) – SF/Crime
Henry James (M, USA), The Turn of the Screw (1898) – Horror

Currently reading

Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown
Anita Heiss (F, Aust/NSW), Not Meeting Mr Right
Sally Rooney (F, Ire), Normal People
Elizabeth Gaskell (F, Eng), Cranford
Anita Heiss ed. (F, Aust/NSW), Growing up Aboriginal in Australia
Meredith Lake (F, Aust/NSW), The Bible in Australia. Don’t Ask!

Home is where the heart is

Journal: 051

Sunday. Here I am home, so no excuses for not keeping up with your posts, for a week or so anyway. I actually got to the outskirts of Perth last night, but it takes a few hours to run two trailers down to the yard, go back, get the other one, get the ute going, unpack my gear from the truck, and my body seems to prefer Victorian time to WA time, which just makes it all another two hours later, and I was already looking at midnight, so I pulled over, slept one more night in the truck and did it all this morning then wandered over to Milly’s, too late for pancakes but there’s always toast.

She of course wanted to go shopping, so I went home and got cleaned up. We both need new stovetops, mine’s not working at all, Lou making do with the oven and an electric frypan. I think we found what I want. I did the regulation traipsing while she looked at stuff she might want, then diverted her to a local Greek for an excellent lunch – saganaki, honey, walnuts how do I moan in text – (we did eat other stuff as well) and a bottle of white. I’m not properly home till I have that first bottle. I was feeling so mellow I drove half an hour to a native garden centre and helped her spend a couple of hundred hard-earned.

That’s boring I know. Stuff you do all the time. Well all the time there’s not a deadly virus raging through your community. But I spend days and weeks on my own (willingly!), on zero blood alcohol, and boring days doing stuff with Millie, the kids, the grandkids is what I look forward to. And sitting at the computer writing, reading. It might take me a day to talk myself out and after that I’m back to solitary stuff.

The other side of ‘home’ is that this trip, for the first time, I road trained through home territory, Victoria, where I grew up, the last mainland state to hold out. Going over, I dipped a toe in the water and crossed the northern tip, to Mildura, but coming back I went the whole hog, assembled the road train at Charlton north of Bendigo (map), ran straight up the highway through Berriwillock and Sea Lake where mum went to school, and her parents before her, and a cousin still farms, then Ouyen, Underbool, Murrayville, all tiny farming towns where a brother was born, dad taught, I went to school, Sunset country, Mallee country. Home.

My uncle Les, mum’s youngest brother (and father of the cousin who still farms there) ran trucks from the family farm between Berriwillock and Sea Lake, bought his first when he was 20 and I was 16, set me on the path I still follow. He married a year or so later, telling me that if I washed his stock crate I could come to the wedding. I did but Grandma vetoed me. If I came, all the cousins would have to come and there were too many. I’d been at my other uncle’s wedding a few years earlier aged 10 maybe, one of only four or five weddings I’ve been to in my whole life, though for my youngest aunty’s I was stuck in the car with my brothers, outside the church hall, fed sausage rolls through the car window by the ladies of the church auxiliary.

Les started off carting sheep. My first job as an owner driver was carting cattle. I ran into him a few times at Newmarket, the Melbourne saleyards across the road from Flemington, posh terrace housing now. I remember telling him one time I’d broken down and he was too busy to stop and help. He took over the family farm and we loss contact except at big family get-togethers but in later years I think his older daughter was happy to take over the tractor work and he ran a few trucks, trading and carting grain. It’s a while now since he died in an accident, but I think of him each time I run up that way, he could have hooked up a couple of trailers behind his biggest Mack and road trained right out the farm gate, and I’m sure he would have.

I should think of dad, too, though he was a very reluctant truck driver. Either the summer before he married mum, or the summer after, Granddad made him get his truck licence so he could take the old ex-army International 7 tonner, rocking and groaning with ten ton of wheat over the dirt roads to the Boigbeat silo, a few miles up the line from Berriwillock where coincidentally I took the ‘sunset’ photo above.

 

Recent audiobooks 

Loren Estleman (F, USA), The Sundown Speech (2016) – Crime
Paolo Bacigalupi (M, USA), Pump Six and other stories (2008) – SF
Erica Wright (F, USA), The Granite Moth (2015) – Crime
Elizabeth Aston (F, Eng), Miss Althea Darcy (2004) – Romance
Dan Simmons (M, USA), Endymion (1996) – SF
Dave Barry (M, USA), Tricky Business (2002) – Crime
Kirstin Chen (F, Sing/USA), Soy Sauce for Beginners (2013)
Will Wiles (M, Eng), Care of Wooden Floors (2012)
Lee Child (M, Eng), The Midnight Line (2017) – Crime

Currently reading

Patrick White, The Cockatoos
Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown
Christine Merrill, Regency Liasons. Milly’s working a few days a week at a Red Cross shop and brought this home so of course I started it while she was cooking tea and will finish it before I do anything else. Like choose a book for ANZLL’s Indigenous Literature Week (July 5-12, 2020) for instance.

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“Home is where the heart is”. Proverb. Origin uncertain.

Setting Out

Journal: 050

I’m setting out on this post with no clear idea of where it will end up. It’s Sunday 6.46 am and in a few hours I am setting out on another trip to Melbourne (from Perth WA if you’re new here). Yesterday I was planning to go half empty but a truck came up on Loadshift, I tendered my usual price, within 15 minutes I had the job, within 3 hours the truck was loaded and back in the yard (my mate’s back paddock).

Today, I’ll run that trailer ‘up the hill’ to the assembly area on the highway south, go back for the other two, and head down to Esperance, 800 km away on the south coast, to load scrap steel. Then it’s off across the Nullarbor, to the northern outskirts of Adelaide, then for the first time as a road train in my old home state, across the north west corner of Victoria and down the river, on the NSW side, to Echuca (map). Break up, run one trailer into Melbourne, then the other two to Wodonga where the steel is remade in an electric arc furnace. Which should put me empty in Melbourne Friday too late to load out.

Sue (WG), who is flat out getting her elderly parents settled in new nursing accommodation (I think at 90 and 100 it’s safe to say elderly), says I should cherish my mother while I have her, so I guess it’s out to mum’s for the weekend.

If you follow Whispering Gums, and doesn’t everyone, you’ll see she’s running a series called Bill Curates, which is me choosing representative posts from her back catalogue – I’ve made my way so far from May to June 2009 – picking out items to repost. Lots of fun for very little effort. A good way, as Karen/Booker Talk suggested in her excellent A to Z of Blogging, of revisiting material not seen by most of her followers, and a good way too of keeping Whispering Gums ticking over while Sue is so busy.

I have to write Journals because I read so little, even when I have “days off”, which mostly involves moving trucks and trailers from one spot to another to get them repaired or serviced or new tyres, or a paint job and new guards (mudguards) as with the trailer immediately behind my ute in the picture above, white and light blue is going to be my new colour scheme, not to mention keeping my bookwork up to date, though none of that explains why I read only a few pages in the evening, catch up on the news, solve a killer sudoku and am fast asleep by 10pm.

Remember, four months ago, when ‘the news’ was that the Australian government was doing nothing about climate change, then bushfires across half the continent made even the Liberal Party aware that climate change was here now, and just when we thought something might happen Covid-19 wiped everything else off the front pages and the Morrison (and Trump) governments took the opportunity to begin sabotaging every remaining climate initiative they could think of, and now the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has wiped Covid-19 off the front pages, except for the relatives of 110,000 people killed by Trump’s willful negligence, but of course it couldn’t happen here. Except it does.

“there’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia. I mean, Australia is a fair country … I mean, Australia is not the United States.” [Prime Minister Morrison]

African Americans make up 12% of the adult population, but 33% of the US prison population; in Australia the ratio for Indigenous people is 3% of the population and 29% of the prisoners. [Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia, 7 June 2020]

Do the maths. Black Australians are FOUR times more likely to be jailed than Black Americans and TEN times more likely to be jailed than white Australians.

Since 1991 and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 432 Indigenous people in prison or in the hands of police have died and not one person has been convicted of any offence in connection with those deaths.

That is the Australia we live in, whether we set out to achieve it or not, an Australia founded on the murder of its original inhabitants, as I have attempted to document, and in which those murders continue today, unpunished.

 

Remember: Indigenous Literature Week (July 5-12, 2020) on ANZLitlovers

 

Recent audiobooks 

Stephanie Laurens (F, Aus), Four in Hand (1993) – Romance
as far as I can tell, Laurens has lived in England for a long time, but she does have some reviews on the Australian Women Writers Challenge database. I should contribute another.
Janet Evanovich (F, USA), Seven Up (2001) – Crime
Camilla Lackberg (F, Swe), The Lost Boy (2013) – Crime
Anne McCaffery (F, USA), Damia (1992) – SF
Susan Choi (F, USA), The Foreign Student (1998)
Blake Crouch (M, USA), Good Behaviour (2016) – DNF
Belinda Alexandra (F, Aus), Silver Wattle (2007) – DNF

Currently reading

Patrick White, The Cockatoos
Majorie Barnard, Miles Franklin
Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (I just bought it, I hope I start reading it)

 

Flannery O’Connor

Journal: 048

I seem to be using the Covid-19 crisis for remedial US.Lit. First Willa Cather, now Flannery O’Connor, courtesy of another read-along, this time with Melanie from Grab the Lapels. (I’m not reading the biography pictured, but Melanie is). O’Connor, who lived a short life, from 1925 to 1964, in Georgia in the US South, wrote two novels and 32 short stories. Her style is said to be Southern Gothic, informed by Catholicism (Wiki). As I am forced to say increasingly often, I had never heard of her.

Melanie is planning to read The Complete Stories, a prizewinning anthology put together after O’Connor’s death and to put up reviews over four consecutive Tuesdays (Wednesdays in Australia) from May 12th. I have located some of the stories online (here) but I imagine more readable copies are obtainable at the usual sites.

I have already read one story, The Barber (so-so) but I love it that the Catholic O’Connor was the originator of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” which was reversed to such great effect by Mae West. OK, I got lost in DuckDuckGo search there for a while. A Good Man etc dates back to at least a 1918 (I think) song by Eddie Green sung here by Bessie Smith.

As a non-reader of short stories I find I am reading three short story collections simultaneously, to get them over with maybe, Flannery O’Connor, Patrick White’s Cockatoos and an Australian women’s collection called The Babe is Wise. I guess at least I can get to the end of a story before I swap books. I struggle to read novels simultaneously because the stories get tangled in my head.

It has been fascinating following the different responses to Covid-19 amongst bloggers. All of us I think stopped reading/writing in shock when we realised that this was not just another SARS, dangerous but remote, but the real deal, our lives being shut down and the world economy with it. Most of us have fired up again, not just in Australia where the first wave has largely passed us by and we in the middle class have jobs and savings to tide us over, but around the world where it is much more likely that you know people who have been affected.

I am doubly or triply unaffected in that as a truck driver I am not required to stay home, so that I am both out and earning my usual income, and I routinely spend a week or two between jobs at home anyway, reading and writing. But still I find myself singularly unproductive. Today is Saturday. I got in from Darwin last Friday. There’re plenty of jobs on the Loadshift site. I should be on my way to Melbourne.

Of course I blame Anzac Day. Long weekends are fine if you’re loaded but a pain when you’re not, just one fewer day to get stuff done. (I’ve left You Tube running since I fired up Bessie Smith and we’ve progressed through Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, George Thorogood. Now that’s real music. Keep your Mozart, WG).

On the way down from Darwin the truck computer was reporting a fault which I managed to work around (the usual way. By switching the truck off and restarting). I had it looked at while I was waiting to unload Friday. No luck. Took it back Tues. “It must be electrical”, the mechanic said. Electrician, Weds. “It must be the computer”. Volvo squeezed me in Thurs night. They’d replace the whole system if you let them, but I held them down to replacing the Ad Blue pump. Seems to have worked. Meanwhile, another workshop had my back trailer for a service which devolved into new brakes and bearings. I got it back 5.00pm Friday. I have the hint of a load of scrap metal today but no-one’s answering the phone. Looks like Monday.

It’s ages since I had reviews written up in advance of a trip. I should have something for Tues, but Thurs/Fri? Don’t like your chances.

WA is one of the states that have expanded allowable gatherings to ten people. I’ve been down to Gee’s to hold the new baby, and to play with the two who were babies just yesterday, interrupted Lou giving them home schooling (not for Covid-19 but because the school has whooping cough. Life goes on!). Took Milly out to dinner. No, restaurants aren’t open yet. We got Indian take-away – happy to have us drop in with Uber gouging 35% for delivery – a fine Pinot Grigio, and sat on my balcony admiring the sunset over the river.

Where has all my reading/writing time gone? Compulsively reading newspapers and political newsletters mostly. Love Guy Rundle in Crikey. Miss Helen Razer. Where are you Helen? Totally enjoying the Palmer Report’s ongoing take-down of the mentally deficient criminal rapist murderer con artist in the White House. Stay Safe!

 

 

 

 

 

New Additions

Journal: 047

I love writing, the way words appear almost unbidden on the page making phrases I didn’t know I was thinking. Sometimes when the words are flowing I amaze myself. I had an editor friend who said to me one day when I had written something prosaic, why don’t you write that other way, and the answer is because I don’t know when it is going to happen, it just happens.

The reason I write Journals is so I can keep writing without the discipline of waiting till I’ve researched a review. I write letters. I enjoy schoolwork. And yet I have never considered writing a book. Well not until now. I’m twenty words in, I wonder how far I will get. If I get serious it will impact on my blogging. Or my driving. And driving pays the bills. Even now, I have to stop sometimes to get stuff written down, I wonder if it will get worse.

As you can see above, while I was away in Darwin the family got a new addition, no not Psyche, her op followed a cancer scare, was routine, planned, but a few hours before I drove her in to Royal Darwin, Gee her younger sister back in Perth, had her fourth, a boy a couple of weeks early and unmentioned in these pages for reasons of superstition (don’t jinx it!). And two or three days prior to that, without a word to her mother or father, she up and eloped! Married her boyfriend Oak in these days of plague without ceremony and with the celebrations held over till next year on Rottnest Island.

Oak already had a couple of his own, so our young Dingo pup has five siblings. Welcome to the family all of you!

Lou, in almost constant demand for babysitting and home schooling, is rapidly learning to appreciate the advantages of bachelorhood. I’m not sure what he’s getting from the government here, though I understand reports of the dole being “doubled” are if not exaggerated, at least premature. This is how I write letters, moving through the family and giving an account of each. Milly is hunkering down with her sister, repurposing her garden for herbs and vegetables.

Did I say Psyche is fine. I feel guilty because a road train job came up, had me on my way out of Darwin less than 24 hours after getting her out of hospital, back in to WA through border control – remember the line in our constitution that says Trade between States shall be Absolutely Free (S. 92) – and down to Halls Creek to load for Perth. So thank you Lluna and Melissa for keeping an eye on her while I scoot off home.

Darwin, like every other city right now no doubt, is very, very quiet. Psyche lives only a few hundred yards (metres) outside the CBD. Her local Woolies is in the middle of town with parking out the front. I went in quite often, sometimes there would be a greeter to spray my hands with sanitiser and sometimes not. I found the local bookshop – BookshopDarwin, I suppose one is all they need – open but empty. I bought Patrick White’s Cockatoos and went back on Saturday to buy Marie Munkara for Psyche’s friends but it had closed early. There seemed to be no restrictions on where we could drive. I would drive most days the four or five ks to Truck City where my truck was parked, to check on it or get some work done at Volvo’s next door. To get it started one time when I found I’d left the park lights on.

Royal Darwin is out on the edge of town, past the airport, so I got to know that drive pretty well too, twice a day at 10.00 and 5.00. Psyche spent a couple of days resting under observation and we would go for a walk to stretch her scars. A very nice young doctor came in the first morning and drew a picture of what they’d done and why it might be sore. Between him and Psyche and Mum I learnt altogether too much.

I use the lists at the end of each journal to total up my reads for the year, but I’ve forgotten to write down the audiobooks I’ve left in the truck. Coming down I listened to Jane Eyre with which I thought I was familiar but maybe not. Milly who does remember what is in the book has said she will help me write a review. All I recall is a young Elizabeth Taylor dying in the Orson Welles movie.

It seems to be a day for good news. Our friend and fellow blogger Nathan Hobby (here) has a publisher for his biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard and not any old publisher, but Melbourne University Press (they must have deemed it sufficiently academic). Release is scheduled for the first half of 2021.

Currently reading

Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau
Ada Cambridge, Sisters
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow
Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Miles Franklin, Bring the Monkey
Patrick White, The Cockatoos

 

Batchelor NT

Journal: 045

Tonight I’m in Batchelor NT, the old Rum Jungle, I think Mary Gaunt’s emponymous Kirkham was a miner here in the 1890s and was chased off by Aborigines. Tonight and for the next seven nights. I was going to stay in daughter Psyche’s spare room in Darwin but she has taken in a Catalonian refugee – who has sent her father, a pro-independence politician, a link to Homage to Catalonia which he apparently enjoyed. The Catalonians last time I heard were very much at odds with Madrid. Perhaps Emma, who lives just “around the corner”, can bring us up to date.

My customer put me up here last night and the mini skirted, champagne drinking proprietoress (my age) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. No not that offer, cheap rates for a week’s stay AND parking for my truck.

Living and working mostly in the desert you forget how lush and alive the tropics are. Now I’m conscious of them the birds might drive me mad.

To continue on from my last post, I picked Lou up from Perth airport on Sunday night, installed him in my flat. Monday was his birthday. Millie and Ms 16, his niece, baked him a cake and brought it round. Sang happy birthday through the screen door. I’d been getting my truck and trailers serviced so I went round and collected them all, fueled up, hooked up and was on my way. When I left Lou was well into William Gibson but I made sure he had some Australian women to go on with (Lou, look on my shelves for Elizabeth Tan, Rubik, I forgot to get it out).

In the morning I found the site where I was to load. The address was ‘Greenough’ but was in fact 50 kms away on the other side of Walkaway (tiny spots on the map 400 km north of Perth but well known to me for various reasons not least the historic Geraldton to Walkaway railway line). Somehow we loaded 3 shipping containers, some frames and 2 piling rigs onto my three trailers and I was off, up the coast. Short of Carnarvon the first night. Past Port Hedland. Nearly up to Kununurra, the Ord River scheme and the NT Border. Like driving on Xmas Day, almost zero traffic. Though there was a queue of maybe 10 trucks when we were held up north of Hedland for a few hours while the police cleared a rollover, 7 people in it, code for ‘Aborigines’.

The (first) NT roadblock was at Timber Creek 100 kms in, manned by police. And army, a chilling sight, though the army boys were mostly sitting round reading books. The policeman assigned to me was cheerful and helpful, sprayed the table and folders before he sat me down and got me to fill in a basic form. I volunteered that I would be self-isolating for 14 days at my daughter’s after unloading, but they weren’t prescriptive and I had the option of getting another load and moving on in the normal way. The next couple of roadblocks I was waved through – I think the internal roadblocks are to protect ‘communities’ ie. remote Aboriginal towns. Just on evening I pulled into Batchelor, found my way to the motel and had a welcome (!) shower, drink, airconditioned sleep.

This morning the project manager (for a new solar farm) was not happy about having an unisolated ‘foreigner’ on his site but no one else was working so he let me out of the truck to help with the unloading. By 9 or 10 I was back here, feeling strangely worn out, and for the first time in years have been napping on and off all day.

I have with me – in my work bag. I have another 20 odd books along the bottom of my storage lockers –

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip
Ngúgí Wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Wizard of the Crow

It will be interesting to see how much reading and writing I get done, more of the latter than the former probably. I feel this is very much an On the Beach situation, which I’ve re-read in the past few years, with central and western Australia the end of the world waiting for the cloud to arrive from China, USA, Italy, Spain, the (Australian) east coast. You guys are already hunkered down in ways that don’t seem quite real out here. And your reactions are quite varied. Sue is concentrating mostly on her parents. The women in my mother’s village seem little changed or concerned though obviously no longer meeting or going to church, an aunt though, just moved up one floor to ‘nursing’, is left almost entirely without exercise or stimulus. Lisa, amazingly, is posting fewer reviews, though plenty of events; Brona, Emma, home from work (I’m guessing) are steadfastly reading, reviewing; Kate too, maybe. Liz, I realise, has dropped off since her last running post; Melanie seems to be home, worried, pressing on. I am blessed to have made so many friends, more than I have briefly mentioned here. I hope you are all well. I hope we all survive.

Road Training

Journal: 043

Many years ago, 35 or so, I was a manager with Fleetxpress, then Australia’s fourth largest transport company and, coincidentally the owner of Luya Julius, a major presence in Qld, started by my great great great grandfather. After giving up truck driving and moving Milly and the kids to Melbourne I was out of work when they employed me as a salesman in Taxi Trucks. When that division was shortly after sold and I was to be made redundant I pointed out to the MD that I was their only employee outside of Accounts with a degree. He put me into Car Carrying as acting State Manager, I dumped the Ford account which was losing money and saved the GMH account, for the cartage of all Holdens throughout Australia, by introducing computerised vehicle tracking.

Unfortunately my complete absence of people skills was already evident and although I set up the new National Car Carrying division, I ended up as National Admin Manager under a newly employed GM. A year or so later Fleetxpress was taken over, I didn’t hit it off with the new owners and I began a decade or so as an independent computer programmer.

Which is by way of saying that I was at the company which introduced B Doubles into Australia (in SA), and got back into trucking just as they were becoming entrenched – was in that last group of drivers able to transition their licences from Heavy Vehicle to Multi Combination without doing the course and the test.

At the turn of this century it was ‘apparent’ that the future lay with B Triples which were then running on a test basis between Geelong and Melbourne and Melbourne and Sydney. I wandered off to WA for 17 years and was considerably surprised on my return to the eastern states to find that they were now giving permits to old fashioned road trains (A trains) and that B Triples were less preferred, especially in Victoria.

This year I have upgraded my own B Double to a B Triple but am struggling to get a permit to cross northern Victoria which is automatic for A trains. Going over last trip I detoured north via Broken Hill, came down to Wentworth and then ran along north of the river (along the Edwards River in fact) to Moama/Echuca, 200 km north of Melbourne, where I broke up to enter Vic. (Map 1)

Coming home I had to do a pick up in Adelaide which meant hooking up at Moama, and then breaking up again to do the 150km between Mildura and the SA border (that is, I had to do the 150 km 3 times – over, back and over). But from there it was a nice run through Loxton and Waikerie right into Adelaide’s northern industrial suburbs, then home (Map 2).

Waking up on Saturday morning in Waikerie, which I haven’t been through for many years, I found I was parked, on bitumen now, exactly where 45 years earlier I had broken down in my old Atkinson, had stripped the motor down in the dust beside the road, to fit a new piston (see The Grapes of Wrath), stripped it down again when I realised the big end bearing shells were coated with sand, then driven off without the sump plug in properly, remembered in time to save the motor, walked back into town where the best replacement I could get was the small bung of a 44 gal drum (200l or 50 US gal.s), siliconed it into place where it stayed until the next and last time, when that poor old girl finally gave up the ghost (her name was Miss Take, but I never did get it painted on).

Of course, I’m really just making excuses for not having read or reviewed … anything at all for the best part of a month. Hopefully I won’t get any more work until after this weekend and so will get The Passing of the Aborigines out of the way, as well as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones which took up a whole trip, Friday till Monday, all that roundabout way from Melbourne to Perth.

Recent audiobooks 

Edith Wharton (F, USA), A Son at the Front (1923)
Jeff van der Meer, (M, USA), Annihilation (2014) SF
Anne Tyler (F, USA), Ladder of Years (1995)
Henry David Thoreau (M, USA), Walden (1854)
Anne Stuart (F, USA), Never Trust a Pirate (2013) Rom.
Lee Child (M, Eng), The Affair (2011) Crime
Dorothy B Hughes (F, USA), The Fallen Sparrow (1942)
Henry Fielding (M, Eng), Tom Jones (1749)
Emily Gould, (F, USA), Friendship (2014)
JD Robb (F, USA), Kindred in Death (2009) SF/Crime
Sayed Kashua  (M, Palestine), Let it be Morning (2006)
Marion Chesney (F, Eng), The Viscount’s Revenge (1983) Rom.
Elizabeth Aston (F, Eng), The Darcy Connection (2008) Rom.
Piper Kerman, (F, USA), Orange is the New Black (2010) Mem.
Andrea Camilleri (M, Ita), The Overnight Kidnapper (2015) Crime
Douglas Adams &  (M, Eng), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) BBC radio SF
Peter Fitzsimmons (M, Aus), Eureka (2012) The author’s breathless anticipation every other paragraph left me unexcited. DNF
Sofie Laguna (F, Aus), The Eye of the Sheep (2014) DNF
Daniel H Wilson (M, USA), Robopocalypse (2011) SF
Boris Akunin (M, Rus), The Winter Queen (1998) Crime/His.Fic.

Boris Akunin is the pen name Russian writer Grigori Chkhartishvili uses for his Historical Crime Fiction. Under his own name Chkhartishvili is apparently well known for his work in Japanese. I just want to point out that Bakunin was a famous Russian anarchist and that the author is probably having a little joke here: “Akunin” (悪人) is a Japanese word that translates to “great bad man”. In his novel The Diamond Chariot, the author redefines an “akunin” as a great evil man who creates his own rules (Wikipedia).

Currently Reading

Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines
Jane Palmer, The Planet Dweller
Jane Palmer, Moving Moosevan
Jamie Marina Lau, Pink Mountain on Locust Island
Chris Owen, Every Mother’s Son is Guilty
Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman
Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

What an Accountant Thinks About

Journal: 041

I suppose you are like me and when you get an idea for a post, if you try and write it out in your head it takes off in unexpected directions. So it was when I began spinning out What an Accountant Thinks about when he Drives a Truck, I found I was off with the fairies ‘writing’ about drugs.

As a young man, even as an anarchist university student in the sixties, I was anti drugs. I don’t care what other consenting adults do, as we used to say, but I left school with fairly Calvinist opinions about sex, drugs, and work. I won’t say any more here about Fancy, my high school girlfriend, but she had a hard time of it, and I spent years reconciling my self-image and my actions. So, drugs. There was plenty of dope and LSD around, and at a further remove, heroin. All of which I was offered, but none of which I was tempted to try.

Likewise, once I had dropped out of uni to be a truck driver (rather than a hippy – I like working) I avoided as much as possible overnight work, which, if you spend all day loading, is impossible without drugs. If I had to do Melbourne-Sydney, a constant stream of high-speed trucks on 880 kms of narrow winding road, I would either get away early, grab 3 or 4 hours sleep, and get in mid-morning, or I would take my time and get in a day late.

By the time of the accident at Bungaree, I had been an interstate driver for four years – I was an old hand, we were all in our twenties back then. Les, my employer, made me take some time off and I pottered around doing odd driving jobs out of Stawell and making desultory attempts to revive my failed marriage to the Young Bride, who with her girlfriend, was off her face on Valium.

Les finally offered me a job on the Adelaide shuttle which did a round trip Melbourne Adelaide every day with two drivers based half way at Nhill. So every lunchtime I would leave Nhill, run down to Melbourne, swap trailers, and by midnight I would be back in my company flat above a shop in the main street, while Terry, a local, went on to Adelaide, swapped trailers, and was back by lunchtime. Our old ex-Ansett Kenworth was doing 5,000 miles – 8,000 km – a week.

This went like clockwork until Terry got a council job and I was partnered with a young lunatic from nearby Horsham who wouldn’t keep the schedule, but kept pushing the changeover time back towards evening, so that I had to drive all night and he could drive during the day. I fronted him. He gave me a handfull of pills. I took them, and kept taking them for another four years. Prescription amphetamines.

I lost my Victorian licence, moved to Adelaide and eventually to Perth. The buzz of driving across Australia, through the day, through the night, for days at a time. A literal buzz. Scalp vibrating, hair standing straight up. Half a briquette, a few shakers, a small Coke (glass bottles in those days) every two hours through the night. Coffee for breakfast. Food optional.

When I met Milly I had been awake six days and was barely coherent. Even after sleep. The disconnect, that is the lag, between thought and speech was noticeable. The other disconnect I was born with. I weighed the same as I did in school, ten and a half stone (70 odd kgs. I’m not double that yet but I’m working on it). Milly and Psyche settled me down. I tried sales work. Drove a bit more. Rolled another truck, Milly pregnant with Lou. Gave it away. Bought a milk round, travelled in truck parts, started a course at Perth Tech in Transport Administration. Found I enjoyed book work and the following year enrolled in an accountancy degree at Churchlands CAE, which by the time I graduated had been subsumed into Edith Cowan Uni.

So for 20 years I worked, briefly, as an accountant, then as a transport manager. As PCs came in I slid across into software development, transport and small business systems, mostly self-employed, started an MBA, did half an MBus in Logistics which I turned into a Grad.Dip., became a partner in a container cartage business, which failed, and there I was, 22 years ago, Gee our youngest in the last year of high school, back truck driving again. Without drugs! I drive long hours, 14, 15, 16 a day, but every night, from 10.00pm to 5.00am, I’m in bed asleep.

And now of course I’m working for myself again. I have a big spreadsheet on my desktop at home, which started out recording my nights away for the taxman, and now has columns for kms, fuel, revenue and expenditure. I can tell you my revenue per km, and therefore my gross margin, is higher than I expected. I’m holding fuel down to below a dollar/km targeting fuel economy, lighter loads and discount retailers (currently the cheapest diesel in Australia is a truckstop in Ceduna in the far west of South Aust.). Tyres and repairs come in at 30c. But do I do my own tax and company accounts? No way! I pay someone who does it for a living.

I might have mentioned somewhere else I was having two weeks off for grandfather stuff while Gee was in Germany for a conference. Only as back up for Milly, but a teenager and 2 primary school age kids use up a lot of energy. As it happened, the other grandparents carried most of the load. On Friday I picked up some freight, there was a big family do Saturday, and as I was about to leave I realised I’d left it too late to borrow any audiobooks from the library. A few hours on Proj. Gutenberg and this is what I came up with –

Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
Willa Cather, Alexander’s Bridge
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
George Sand, Devil’s Pool
G&W Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody
Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Willa Cather, O Pioneer
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

I’m in Melbourne now and I’ve listened to the first five, ok, four, Diary of a Nobody was both too tedious and too embarrassing to go on with. Rider Haggard was good fiction with some jarring racism; Alexander’s Bridge was brilliant but inexplicably, halfway through the reader changed from a softly spoken young American, to an older, stumbling, Australian with a genius for mis-emphasis and the book was destroyed. The Secret Agent had a different reader for every chapter, but also a different protagonist, and so the reading went ok. I’ll write it up when I get home. Devil’s Pool was the nicest love story I’ve read for years, and I’ll write it up too.

A couple of others, the chapters are coming up in the wrong order, which I hope I can fix. I might start the trip home with Woolf then go on with Hardy or Moll Flanders. We’ll see.

Recent audiobooks 

Ian Rankin (M, Sco), A Question of Blood (2003) – Crime
Graeme Simsion (M, Aus/Vic), The Rosie Result (2019)
Leo Tolstoy (M, Rus), War and Peace (1869)
Stephen White (M, USA), The Program (2002) – Thriller
Will Self (M, Eng), Shark (2014) – Literary. DNF
Mark Twain (M, USA), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) – YA
David Weber (M, USA), On Basilisk Station (2004) – SF
JD Robb (F, USA), Calculated in Death (2013) – Crime/SF

Currently reading

Charlotte Wood, The Weekend
Lionel Wigmore, The Long View
Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River
Marie Munkara, Every Secret Thing
Peter Goldsworthy, Wish
Heather Rose, Bruny
AB Paterson, An Outback Marriage
Walter Scott, Waverley
David Ireland, The Flesheaters