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Australia

Sarah, 1 June 2009
Australia , Perth

Welcome to Eneabba

One of my original reasons for heading west to Perth was to try and find work in the middle of nowhere. I was looking for the kind of place where they shoot roos for breakfast and wrestle crocodiles for a bit of afternoon's entertainment. Or, if I couldn't manage that much, somewhere where, at the very least, they drove very big cars. I've found it - a place about 300 kms north of Perth, Eneabba. If you're struggling with the pronounciation of that - or you don't think you're struggling with the pronounciation of that but you're getting it wrong anyway - then I'll help you out, it's any-abba.

I arrived in Perth about 9 in the morning. After shelling out a small fortune for a bed on the train, I felt great. I felt even better when I found my hostel and didn't feel a vague sense of revulsion, as I normally do when faced with hostels in the city. A few hours later I wander past one of the backpacker job shops and find a new advert for a barmaid in an outback town and ask the woman at the counter about it.

'It's very small.' is the first thing she tells me, and she repeats this several times, even taking out a map to show me how small it is. It does look pretty small. There are about ten streets. I tell her that I want to be in the city, or in a very small place. It's the places in the middle that are a nightmare, that's the worst of both worlds. She weighs me up and obviously thinks that I'm not an idiot and gives me the telephone number of the woman who owns the pub. She also writes down the name of the town, which is great because she's not sure how to pronounce it and at this stage I have no idea either.

My phone interview goes a little like this:
'Hi, the jobshop gave me your phone number. Are you still looking for staff? I've got experience.'
'Errr, yeah. Have you worked in a TAB before?'
'No, but I learn pretty fast.'
'Can you get here on Thursday?'
'Yep, see you then!'

When I go to get my coach ticket from the station I show the man the card with the name of the town written on it, in pretty much the same way that information booths write down the name of your hotel to show taxi drivers in foreign cities. The man in the booking office asks what I did that was so wrong I'm getting sent to Eneabba for a punishment.

Here's the thing about West Australia. It's a very big place, and not a lot of people live here. There are cattle stations bigger than European countries. It's two hours behind Sydney. Perth is closer to Singapore than Sydney. 1.9 million people live in WA, 1.4 million people live in Perth. That means (if you're rubbish at maths) that 500,000 people live spread out in a very, very, very big area. By WA standards, Eneabba is neither small, nor isolated. It's a mining town, and I would say that it's roughly the population of Thorpe on the Hill, the village I come from. If you exclude the miners, it's smaller, about 40 houses. When I called my parents to give them my telephone number in case of emergencies (like, they won the lottery and desperately needed to give me a million pounds), my Dad went to see if he could find it on a map of Australia. I didn't know he'd done this or I'd have told him not to bother. I'd have been wrong, he found it on a map of Australia. This was the best example I could ever have thought of to show the difference in geographical and population size between the UK and Australia. Try and find Thorpe on the Hill on a map of the UK, a map of the UK that would be big enough to show Thorpe on the Hill would be the size of a small room. But this town a few kilometres from the coast is on a map of Australia. Kind of crazy.

Here'a another comparison game. Let's compare Eneabba, a small town, with Ngukurr, another small town. One in WA and one in the Northern Territory. One has very well maintained roads and walkways, a golf course and tennis courts as well as a superb swimming pool. It also has two shops, at reasonable prices, two playgrounds. Generally it feels like a small town or village in a developed country. The other, well, doesn't feel like that at all. The roads are bad and it's a dirt track to get there. The shop is crazily expensive, it feels like a town in a country far removed from the ogther parts of Australia that I've seen. Now guess which one has mainly white people living there, and a rich organisation supporting it, and guess which one is for the blackfellas. Hmmm. That's probably a slightly easier game to play than the one on how to pronounce Eneabba.

The pace of life is slightly slower than Melbourne though, just a tad. It's like fast forwarding to how life must be when you're old. I've turned into one of those old women who sit on their porches and watch the world go by - because it's more interesting than sitting inside. And not a lot of world goes by in Eneabba. The bus to Perth has just pulled up. A man has stopped to ask if he can use the toilet and a couple with a small baby have made a comfort stop. The pub is next to the Roadhouse so it's double the excitment. On Friday night half our customers were people who had broken down. Oh, and don't forget the telephone box. This is the land of no mobile phone reception after all. The phone box and the roadhouse provide one of those useful pitstop for folk on their long way north or south. So you get to observe the roadtrip stagger. The one for people who are hot, tired and have eaten nothing but crisps and cans of coke for two days. You claimb out of the car, stagger three steps sideways, stretch (in perfect, almost choreographed, unison withthe cars fellow inhabitants) and realise that you can barely remember your name or where you come from. You do a slow walk to the back or front of the car, wait for the person to come back from the loo, and fall back in the car for the next three or four hours.

I have completely lost track of which day it is and can't quite believe I've only been here a week. I think my mission of personal improvement could be quite successful, I'm on my third book and I've been swimming twice, and jogging three times. It's either that or alcoholism.

I've also found confirmation that two years outside the UK has adjusted my temperature control gage by about five degrees. I knew it was quite warm the last week. The sort of weather you need to hide in the shade from and don't sleep under your covers. I'd have out it at about 33 degrees. On one of my swims I was chatting to a couple of the other people there (well, the only two other people there). They told me that the temperature the last week had been nearly 40 degrees, and a quick check on the thermometer showed that it was 38 degrees right then. This morning as I set off on my sweaty stumble around the village (probably a more accurate description than running) I felt quite chilly - it was probably about 26 degrees - easily shorts and t-shirt weather. I don't think I can survive a January and February in the UK ever again.

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