Day 112 | Near Sullivans Creek, Goldfields Highway: just a day plugging along the tarmac

97 km | zzOz total: 5,508 km

The road is hammered smooth by those huge road trains carrying gold ore, or miscellaneous mining equipment.

There is traffic out here, a truck or 4WD about at 5 minutes intervals even the occasional tourist.

I bash into the wind, the morning’s efforts aren’t stacking up the milage, it’s one of those days when you put your head down and plod along.

I wave out at the truck drivers, no wimpy finger raised off the steering wheel you get from a caravan driver from me. I either do the full salute, raise the left hand, fist clenched, or stare out into the vegetation undisturbed, my Lawrence of Arabia headgear maintaining my privacy like a burka wearer, I have nothing much in common with those 4WD drivers other than current proximity.

I get a couple of less than usual salutes, some grinning bogan raises his bottle of Jack Daniels, distinctly low tide but manages to keep his two tonnes of metal on the appropriate side of the road.

I also get the weirdo signal froma couple of youthful mine workers and get a sense of the humourous putdowns bouncing around their standard white Toyota 4WD interior. They’ve got their standard yellow hi-vis shirts on, standard goatees, generally your standard all round blokes, I guess, with the standard banter.

WA does seem to demand and reward conformity, maybe I’m out of touch and it’s pervasive across the world now.

Mining has a peculiar tradeoff: give over your life completely on the job and live any life in your week off.

Accommodation for the workforce is a standard industry wide 10’ x 12’ cell, including toilet and shower, beige exterior, off white interior. Transport is generally by bus to the site. A 430 am start for 13 or 20 days in a row, no difference between days, breakfast in the cafeteria, the same grinding repetitive task day by day, week by month by year. No alcohol or drugs allowed, random testing possible at any time. Fail that and your career may be over.

Seems to me it’s no glamourous life, more like a slave camp, not dissimilar to a gulag, except the food and accommodation are a few stars up the rating scale.

But the same selling of the soul for future gratification.

Yeah, a slave camp, and the slavery is to money, the standard excuse for the conformist tradeoffs.

Then again I generally live in tight accommodations, get up early, do more or less the same thing every day, and abstain from alcohol. So I guess I’m a slave to that poor overloaded bike and my absurd itinerary.

At least I don’t have to wear those hi-vis shirts.