A Boy Miner

Brett J Jenkins

Description

A Boy Miner is the true story of an eighteen-year-old boy thrown into the man’s world of FIFO underground mining from 1996 to 2000, taking him to the Western Australian outback mine of Bronzewing, then the Silver Swan nickel mine near Kalgoorlie, and finally The Granites gold mine in the Northern Territory’s Tanami Desert. A Boy Miner explores the trials of negotiating the meaning of masculinity, of mateship, and the effects that absence and isolation can have on FIFO workers and their families. At times humorous, profound, and melancholic, A Boy Miner reflects the swinging moods of the boy and the wider mining community, living by the cycle of a FIFO roster.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Memoir
• Non-fiction
• Mining
• Bildungsroman
• Australia
• Underground
• FIFO

Informations

• Publié par: Brett J Jenkins
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9780995408661
• Langue: English

Extrait

A BOY MINER
Brett J Jenkins is a Western Australian writer. He has worked as an underground miner, before gaining his PhD in English and Comparative Literature, and is now a proud stay-at-home dad—the greatest challenge of them of all.

Copyright © Brett J Jenkins 2019
The rights of Brett J Jenkins to be identified as the moral rights owner of the Text of this Work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth).
This book is copyright.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Book Design and Typography by Logorythm
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN: 978-0-9954086-5-4 ISBN: 978-0-9954086-6-1 (e-book)
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I must obey the rules I must be tame and cool No staring at the clouds I must stay on the ground In clusters of the mice The smoke is in our eyes Like babies on display Like angels in a cage I must be pure and true I must contain my views There must be something else There must be something good Far away Far away from here Far away, far away from here Far away, far away from here Far away, I’m far away from here And I’ll be here for good For good
Boot Camp, Soundgarden (1996)
Contents
Preface
Part 1: Bronzewing
A Mistake
Day Two
The Onram
Shower
Work ethic
Home
Prodigal son
Isolation
Two months and Underground
Shift Change
Narratives of mining
Three months and Boof’s arrival
Mine Hierarchies
Camp societies
Six Months and a Merry Bronzewing Christmas
The LM75
A picnic
Part 2: Silver Swan
July 1997
Renting
Silver Swan
The Onram
Town job
Creeping
Limbo
Hay Street
Time to leave
Part 3: The Granites
January, 1998
The Onram
Aaron
Rash and friendship
A house
Hernia
Trucks
Diversity
Daryl and Shit
Love
Service Crew
Dave P
The mine, charge up, and stopes
Courage
Two fires
Compensation and Shadows
Explosives
Millennium and a break-up
Three deaths and six months to go
The new boy
The last shift
Endings
Acknowledgments
Preface
The boy—who will be known as the boy, and then Neph, again the boy, and finally Shaggy—is me, the author of this true story; and he is not me. I do recognise him: we share the same proper name, similar facial features, height, eye colour, the same voice, the same limp. But then I don’t recognise him, the boy who spent four-and-a-half years, from July 1996 to December 2001, working in underground mines deep beneath the red dirt of the Western Australian goldfields, and then the flat red wastelands of the Northern Territory’s Tanami desert. I remember him, imagine him, but I don’t know him. I don’t know this past self almost as much as I don’t know my future self. I can imagine who I will be but I do not know why he will be that way, different from what I am now, and different to what I would imagine. Even now my present self astounds me by his ignorance, strengths, desires, anxieties, and pretence. The boy from the underground is not me, a stranger, but he was part of my becoming. And, would if I could, I would thank him, shake his unfamiliar hand, for what he did.
PART 1
Bronzewing
A Mistake
July 1996
It was his step-uncle Peter who got him the job, working in an underground mine as a diamond drill offsider, so called not because the rig drilled for diamonds, although it could, but because of the diamond-impregnated drill bits needed to cut through the rock. Rock so hard they needed the hardest rock to cut it. The diamond drillers drilled for core samples, from the underground, holes up to 500 metres deep, mapping the course of the ore body.
Fly-in, fly-out. FIFO. Two weeks on, one week off. Peter sold it to the boy with the promise of big money, silly money, more than he could have imagined. It wasn’t too hard, convincing the boy, given that he still lived at home with his parents, had a second-rate education, didn’t have a car, qualifications, or any clear, long-term aspirations in his jobless town. Which is to say he really had no choice.
‘Come to the mines. Come up north,’ his uncle said, where north mostly meant east and away from the coastline. ‘Come to the outback. Come to the deserts’ was what he meant. This was the familiar call for many generations of willing, strong-backed young men not only from Western Australia, the great mining state, but for young men from Australia’s eastern states, New Zealand, and beyond. There were few who didn’t know someone working FIFO. Gold, iron ore, nickel, alumina, copper. Plenty of ways to make a buck if you’re willing to dig.
His uncle’s heart was in the right place, taking a gamble on a scrawny eighteen-year old boy, even if the gesture wasn’t appreciated at first. This is because the boy, ignorant of his ordinariness, had it in his head that he was destined for something more important, more fulfilling and intellectually stimulating than the brute labour of mining, even if at the same time he was utterly lost as to what that destiny was, or the steps he would need to take to make it happen. Lost on the boy also that work was hard to come by, let alone paid this well, or that it was an opportunity that would be prized by many. Even so, Peter was rubbing the boy against his urban nap, the harsh lonely outback never the place for making his mark.

It was July 1996 when the boy made his start, two months after his eighteenth birthday. He was at a small satellite terminal near Perth’s domestic airport, mid afternoon, readying to board a Dash 8, a small propeller plane, with seating for about forty, for the hour-and-a-half direct flight to Bronzewing, a gold mine about eighty kilometres north-west of Leinster, itself almost one-thousand kilometres east north-east of Perth.
He handed his bag over to the boarding staff, was handed a ticket, before taking a seat amongst twenty or so men to wait. Men of all kinds: mostly tall, some short, cologned and malodourous with cigarettes, wide and thinnish, bearded and clean-shaven, casual, plain-clothed in blue jeans, thongs and flannos (hi-vis not yet part of the FIFO zeitgeist). The boy was the youngest there by some seven or eight years; young enough to be someone’s son to at least half of them.
He was rightly ignored, the men looking past him as you would an outsider, not wanting to make accidental eye-contact, worried the boy might latch on, imprint on them the role of father. As if in war, he was the brand-new recruit about to be thrown into the jungle and sure to get his fool head blown off within days. A liability. Best to keep a distance, leave him anonymous until he proved himself. Freeze him out, cold shoulder; mumble an insincere greeting, but only if they have to. He did the same, not meeting their eye, not avoiding it either, as if to say that he had a right to be there. Cagey, trying to look tough amongst the even-cagier men, trying his best to fit in and hide. Some were talkative, chatting to each other, but most were taciturn after the exchange of a few g’days. Not a word his way. Peter was meeting him at Bronzewing. A stranger amongst strangers till then.
There wasn’t the excited push and shove he expected when they got the boarding call, more a languid reluctance. No rush, no prize for being first. On take-off, most fell asleep immediately, folding the meal tray down in front of them and resting on it, their heads nestled in their folded arms, quickly filling the plane with chainsaw snoring and noxious suffocating farts. The men were taking the opportunity to steal some sleep given that this crew—what would become his crew—were heading straight for a twelve-hour night shift, which, for most of them, meant they would be up for more than twenty-four hours before they slept again. The boy was wide awake, not because it was his first time in a plane (he, like almost every Western Australian, had been to Bali at least once) but because he was still unsure of the procedure, whether they would eat or drink, be entertained. Those still awake were served refreshments (a bottle of water and pre-packed cheese and crackers) by the hostess, a beautiful, tall, nameless woman. The rest she snuck by as if stepping amongst coiled rattlesnakes.
They flew turbulently across the tree-green Darling Range, before the ground beneath flattened and became divided into the yellow, brown, and green rectangular patchworked shapes of the Wheatbelt farmland—other generations, ancestors, passing down an old quilt, to be tilled and sown and reaped. Finally, it became the red dirt and sparse trees of the Goldfields, leaving his understanding of civilisation well behind.
Much of the journey was spent contemplating exactly what he was in for—the nature of the job and what the underground would be like. Peter hadn’t told him much, and what he did tell hadn’t make much sense, abstract and incomprehensible. His own understanding seemed to be comprised of flitting images from TV or photos, but nothing vivid or solid in outline. He also didn’t know much about the camp. He thought of his school camps, all of which were located in or near towns, and had been down south where it was green and cool. That the camp resembled any of this became increasingly unlikely with each minute as t