Low Life | 9 May 2009

I met Digger 30 years ago in a plastics factory. We put in 12-hour shifts on adjacent injection moulding machines, which is a good way to get to know somebody, and we knocked about together after work, mainly in pubs, for a year or so, and then I went away and we lost contact. Six weeks ago he sent me an email. He’d recently taught himself computer skills and gone online and he’s getting in touch with all his old English buddies, he said. He was living in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, working for a mining company. He takes geologists into the outback, sets up their camps and generally looks after them, and when they’ve finished examining the rocks, he conducts them safely back to civilisation. When you get them around a campfire with a beer in their hand, geologists can be very interesting people, he says. This is his first salaried job after a lifetime of tree surgery and tobacco picking.

He attached some photos to his email — another recently acquired skill. One showed him relaxing at home with a can of lager in a stubby holder and a baby kangaroo peering out from under his work shirt. His girlfriend, Rowena, rescues injured wildlife, he explained, which mainly means raising orphaned kangaroos. He and the joey looked the picture of absolute contentment.

One of my aunts — recently deceased — was a so-called ten pounds settler. She lived at Albany in Western Australia, and every Christmas throughout my childhood she sent back pictorial calendars of local beauty spots. To my youthful eyes, Australia looked like another planet. One year, instead of a calendar, she sent a map of Australia printed on a linen tablecloth. My mother used it often and I always sat next to Kalgoorlie, whose apparent remoteness from anywhere else, and above all its peculiar sounding name, made me hope to go there one day.