The Best Australian Essays 2015 (12 page)

DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!
is the most hyper-allusive album to Cave's name, as great a case for bricolage as one could ever hope to find. Throughout its eleven tracks, the likes of the Bible,
The Odyssey
,
One Thousand and One Nights
and works by Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and Wallace Stevens are ransacked, often within a single song. In the bedlamite's address of ‘We Call Upon the Author', Berryman is name-checked:

An encomium, to be sure. But the mode in which admiration of the poet is expressed is a white rabbit for readers of Berryman – an invitation by Cave to dig deeper. From ‘Dream Song #3':

One page over in ‘Dream Song #4', Henry describes a prandial scene in which he makes eye contact with a woman with ‘[b]lack hair, complexion Latin'. He watches her:

before admitting ‘[t]here ought to be a law against Henry'.

Cave's ‘Today's Lesson' describes two characters: Janie and her sex pest bête noire, Mr Sandman – a Tex Avery embodiment of the rampant male id. (He ‘likes to congregate around the intersection of Janie's jeans'.) Early on, we get the lyric:

The cribbing is surely a conscious one, a wink to fellow admirers of the poet. Even the album's title track, wherein Cave's narrator implores the Biblical dead man to ‘dig [him]self / back in that hole', appears to have roots in
The Dream Songs
. From ‘Dream Song #91':

‘Insomnia-plagued' is not a bad description of the jeopardised psyches that abound in Cave's lyrics from this period. They share their wanton libidinousness with
The Dream Songs
, too. In ‘Dream Song #351' Berryman writes:

This might be the imaginative engine that powered Grinderman. From
Grinderman 2
, ‘Heathen Child' finds its female protagonist masturbating in the bath, assailed by visions of the Wolfman and Abominable Snowman. The following lines:

and:

are lifted from the first stanza of ‘Dream Song #40':

Cave has always been forthright about how he magpies from a vast array of sources. One gets the sense that whenever that ‘great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres … every thought' of ‘We Call Upon the Author' descends, Cave – bibliomancer that he is – might reinvigorate his creative mojo by simply opening a book, selecting a choice phrase, and having it. He is a model postmodernist, and all art is recombinant. Cryptomnesia – the phenomenon highlighted by Jonathan Lethem in his essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence' – is of course another likelihood here. As with that stray Dorothy Parker line in his film
The Proposition
, it is possible that other direct quotations find their way into Cave's work by the Trojan horse of false inspiration. After all, when the fish are biting, one does not pause to question if they might be driven and not lured to the hook.

Island

Open Ground

Rebecca Giggs

Every few months my mother flies north from Perth to Karratha with a prosthetic penis in her carry-on luggage. At check-in, she says, she watches the X-ray operator closely, anticipating their double-take. She suspects that one day her case will be pulled from the queue and publicly unpacked, so she keeps a letter of explanation from her employer folded in her handbag. To date, the airport staff have always been too busy screening the mineworkers boarding at that early hour – swabbing their bags and jackets for explosives, making provision for the transportation of industrial detonators – to react to one rubberised phallus, flashing across their monitors with the slapstick punctuality of a prank. My mother's case coasts through unopened, flanked by pairs of steel-capped boots that pile in a clunking tangle on the end of the conveyor belt. In thick socks, their owners shuffle through the metal detector.

Once I got a kick out of the idea of the plastic penis sailing through the luggage scanners, a little feminist rush from that incursion into the coercively masculine space of the mines. But one way to explain what my mother is doing with the plastic parts of a man she is conveying up north is that she is participating in a symbolic order whereby the worker is unembodied. The other contraption she sometimes carries with her is a single latex arm with peristaltic veins that pulse, packed in a violin case. Who is this person, I used to wonder? Is she is putting him together on the plane?

It is blood that is my mother's trade – she works for a pathology company.

In the 2011–12 financial year, around 33,100 men and women flew to the Pilbara region of Western Australia, following the financial inducements of the minerals and energy boom. A continent ensconced within a continent, the Pilbara's rocks are some of the earth's oldest. Iron ore, hematite – the valuable plate-rock of the Pilbara – is named after the Greek αἷμα (
haima
) – ‘blood' – for its rufous colour. The poet Mark O'Connor notes in his book
Pilbara
(John Leonard Press, 2009) that the red lava flows near Roebourne date 3.2 billion years, birthdaying with minerals on the moon. The WA Local Government Association estimates that in the last twenty years the number of non-resident employees in the region has increased 400 per cent. Most work at mining these ancient repositories.

My mother helps to train the phlebotomists and collectors who handle drug and alcohol testing on site. The transnational corporations that dominate the region are invested in a few key components of their workers' physical bodies. Every major mining operation conducts routine, randomised blood and urine testing for stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens and alcohol – a requirement enshrined in legislation. My mother's mother was also a blood collector and she worked the Wheatbelt, taking and transporting warm or cold vials, haemoglobin-red (often testing them for iron). My grandmother is still known by those in the business for her steady hands and her local knowledge – even after she retired she was sometimes called out to bleed patients with small or ailing veins. ‘Getting blood from a stone' might make a good family motto.

Urine samples, by mandate of the companies in the Pilbara, are to be taken under observation. The plastic penis is a dummy (available online), which is attached to a bag of ‘clean' urine hidden somewhere underneath the clothes. The decoy my mother shows to her trainees is an example of how far men have been known to go to dodge a positive result. The arm in the violin case, meanwhile, is a practice apparatus, so that trainee collectors don't begin by bruising real people. So my family is involved with another kind of extractive industry: drawing a tributary of blood – millilitre by millilitre – from under so many skins and ferrying it back to laboratories in Perth.

*

You hear about the lock-ins when the cyclones come through the north-west, suspending on-site operations for days at a time. Bent Xbox marathons and hard drinking sessions in stuffy rooms. But the most infamous benders happen during the weeks away from site – entire pay packets put down on red or black. Studies show boredom, fatigue, stress, low levels of social attachment and high disposable income foster conditions conducive to drug use and hard drinking among the mineworkers. Frequent seizures of legal highs such as Kronic, K2 and Karma (all synthetic cannabis), and the on-site banning of bodybuilding supplements such as Jack3d, have curtailed the use of recreational stimulants but there are many tactics for avoiding a positive result on a drug test. Such ingenuities thrive in the Pilbara. One story I was told described how tests are randomly assigned by drawing a white marble out of a pouch of coloured marbles. Before passing around the pouch, the site manager puts the white marble in a pot of boiling water so that, by touch, workers who are confident of giving a positive result can identify and avoid it.

Being ‘on the swing', it used to be called. They come from Busselton, Broome, Perth, Sydney, Auckland, Bali and further yet. Now known as FIFO – fly-in fly-out (pronounced as in fee-fie-fo-fum,
fiefo
) – it's arguably Australia's most extensive, expensive and recurrent internal migration. Arguably, because no national authority collects reliable, impartial data on the region's transient workforce. Mineworkers don't register a second address, change their electoral enrolment or claim Medicare benefits apropos their on-site residence. Rates are paid on property owned in feeder communities and driver's licences are listed to primary residential addresses, so it's difficult to track the flow of employment into, out of and around the north-west. The paucity of hard data on how many people work FIFO stints and for what duration led a February 2013 Parliamentary report,
Cancer of our Bush or the Salvation of our Cities?
, to deem such workforces ‘shadow populations'. Yet for many established regional towns the shadow is anything but a nebulous, shifting presence. FIFO labour forces are literally high visibility: a permanent presence in the streets, the shops and on the roads that attend the subterranean boluses of ore found there.

*

The registered names of mining operations give something away that the recruitment brochures do not. A quick scan of the minedex database of deposits and prospects, maintained by the WA Department of Mines and Petroleum, reveals past and present proposals lodged under jokey phrases like ‘Chunderloo', ‘Snottygobble', ‘Three Boys–Golden Pig Underground', ‘Electric Dingo', ‘The Big Bell Gold Crown Great Waste Dump', ‘Hope for the Best Tailings Disposal' and ‘The Silver Swan Crushing Circuit'. (The last two are, perhaps, inadvertently humorous, being extensions of established mine-names. ‘Hope for the Best' makes more sense pegging out an unexplored tenement.) Other names are quips of a different sort: ‘The Golden Shower (at Kitty's Gap)', ‘Blink Models Ltd., Wet Dream at North Star', ‘Mount Pleasant Black Lady Pit (Tailings Disposal)', ‘Barbara's Surprise Underground', ‘Big Dick Prospecting: Scrape and Detect'.

Today's boom – which is waning – is the third to glean from WA, and the largest in a series of Australian economic explosions led by mineral extraction and exportation. The first entailed the great gold and copper rushes of the late 1800s, a time of renegade prospectors. I was born during the dog days of the second boom – nickel, gold, petroleum, bauxite, alumina and iron ore in the late '70s, early '80s. My father, a young electrician, emigrated from the United Kingdom and found work on the excavation of Newman's Mount Whaleback. The workplace safety regimes that prevail in the sector now were then no more than perfunctory, and he left that job after one too many close calls with electrocution. As he tells it, he leapt from a turbine with seconds to spare when a workmate inadvertently began powering up the grid. While he was shaken enough to quit and retrain in another industry, many of Dad's mates still worked in mining (or associated trades) throughout my childhood. Blundstones lined up by the front door in Perth, reflective vests slung over the chair backs. Argyle, Hamersley, Robe River and the Super Pit, distantly disgorging rocks, metal, water. Men's shorts from that time showed their legs, matted with nubs of plaster or grease and as strong as if they'd waded back through the ground itself.

My stories about the Pilbara began then, but not as stories about remoteness or heavy industry; they were personal stories about bodies, about family and about connection.

*

I was nine when my uncle Terry, then a geologist for Western Mining, gifted me a lapidary kit of stones from the region. The '87 crash was behind us and the market was ramping up again by dint of international energy prices. ‘Lapidary', an old, alchemic word, does not belong in the lexicon of mining. The term derives from a mystic age when stonecutting, chemistry and philosophy were one trade and certain minerals were believed to have metaphysical properties. In the modern sense, lapidary designates the polishing, carving and display of decorative gemstones – a pastime of hobbyists and new-agers, who sometimes refer to themselves as ‘rockhounds'. My uncle wasn't a rock-hound, but I was a collector. More specifically, I was drawn to collecting objects for which elaborate backstories could be created, things like old coins and driftwood. Uncle Terry thought the stones might fit that description.

In the lapidary kit, each rock was set into a divot on a foam mounting. The case contained twelve different minerals. One was rippled red and white like ossified lasagne. Another was so delicately fretted it looked as if it had been left out in the cold to crust with frost. I would have worn the fool's gold on a chain around my neck, had I owned a chain thick enough. It was an exceptional thing for a nine-year-old to own, matched to the schoolyard craze for ‘mood stones' (rings set with plastic opals that were meant to change colour according to the wearer's emotions). At show-and-tell I proudly laid out my rocks one by one for the class, naming
chert
,
dolerite
,
quartz
,
sandstone
,
agate,
hematite
,
pyrite
,
marble
,
gelignite
. I hovered over that last rock; black, faceted in small battens that caught the light.

‘I don't think that is gelignite,' said my teacher warily, standing up behind her desk. Thereafter, my lapidary set was confiscated for examination by the principal and the class was turned out for a brisk run on the oval.

I have thought about the lapidary kit often since, and have dreamt about it on and off again for the past twenty years. Nothing that so captivates is lost to the unconscious mind, even if spelunking to deep memory is required to retrieve it. I am turning the shining rocks, explaining each for an unseen listener. What I called gelignite was likely to have been rough black tourmaline or volcanic obsidian (although the rocks drew a mesmerising charge from Pilbara, it is possible not all of them were actually from there). Semiprecious, the gems' greatest worth was as eye-catchers. Cold to touch and gratifying to gauge in a palm or a pocket, they were variously heavier or lighter than they appeared. How had these objects surfaced in such rough country? Tiny feats discharged by immense systems, from primordial time. They seemed to have undergone otherworldly transformations – acts of accretion and compression beyond scientific knowledge. The hearts of mountains seized. Part of their appeal was an imaginative disjunction with the scale, ferocity and fierce monotony of the environment in which they had been forged.

In my dreams, I've forgotten the names. Or I remember the names, but the case is only full of dun river stones or no stones at all. What were those rocks ever meant for, but to evoke an unobtainable terrain? A
terra incognita
brought to life in the mind of myself at nine, a place I still reach for.

*

Each of us has within us a formative landscape, and I think of those people I know now who grew up on the hematite ground and have never been able to wash the red off their feet – even after so many decades of living in cities where they rarely, if ever, go barefoot. Few of us so palpably evince the places we have been shaped by, though our lines of thought may also betray us, propagated over topography as surely as plants grow up an espalier. In an essay titled ‘Raw Material', written for
Westerly
in 1961, the author Randolph Stow described his conviction that solid terrain is assimilated into our mental country, rumpling our ideas and creative impulses in ways we're not always alert to:

Stow, more so than any other Australian writer I can think of, mined his internal stratigraphy for the substance of his novels and poems. His work domesticates the kinetic energy of Western Australia's vastness to human relationships, with devastating effect. But what happens when the defining quality of the geology that orientates your creative navigations is its
instability
? When the ground figuratively ‘beneath your feet' is not there – is not even where you fling your imagination out to – for it flows onto computer-driven trains and off the edge of Australia, is carried by bulk cargo ships across the ocean, is changed through hot alchemy in foreign steel mills, to come to brace great municipal buildings, make monuments, make money.

The Pilbara landscape that undergirded my imagination was both fugitive and, like its workforce, constantly mobile. An imaginative shadowlands. Homogenous and strange. The rocks in the lapidary set didn't just speak of a place far away, they
were
that place; their presence testified to its continued plundering and erasure. If I ever got to visit the Pilbara myself (which didn't happen until I was in my twenties) I suspected that the minerals I knew from their samples might already have disappeared, shipped wholesale to China, Japan or South Korea. At the very least, they'd be harder to find. The Pilbara of my youth, which the kit betokened, was to remain unreal and unreachable – littered with luminous, lunar stones. It was an environment I might have as readily arrived at as Lilliput or Middle Earth. Everything taken from there could not be put back.