Boom Town Darwin

The air is wet. The rain hot.  The intensity of the build up is over. With eighty inches a year the place is lush, tropical. After the rains we often go in search of fresh bamboo shoots. Our favorite place is past Humpty Doo between the Wetlands Lookout and the the, croc infested, Adelaide River. Not only does my wife cook the shoots she revels in the Thai like landscape, the tropical nature of the top end. It proves to be both an antidote for her homesickness and food for our table. We scour the trees and shrubs for medicinal vegetables. If in doubt she rings her step mother in Wat Sing, rural Thailand, or up country as they say it. She describes the shape of the leaf and the type of tree to her step mum and they decide if it is in fact the same tree or shrub with the healing remedies she is looking for.  Thai culture is a culture of food and family. Rice is holy. Buddha with a cup of tea, coconut milk and an apple occupies the permanently open cupboard above the fridge above the microwave. We’re in a bedsit. Originally Buddha was in front of our bed, in the dresser, but Maggie, my wife, kept getting sick, finally she, along with two of her children, decide that her sickness was emanating from our feet facing Buddha and it has offending him. Her cough improves after Buddha is shifted.  The Rapid Creek market provides most of the Thai vegetables.  A little meat from the butcher and the ice cream and chocolates from Woolly (Woolworths). The Papaya Salad, chili mixes and many food combinations are mixed on the floor in the terracotta bowl we had to bring from Thailand. She didn’t think Australia would have the one she wanted. We eat on a mat on the floor. The food is gathered, prepared and then eaten. Saigo, coconut cream and ice cream is my favorite. Every morning they pray to Buddha and prepare the days food. Then we have been job hunting.

There was a position as a kitchen hand in a chicken take away advertised this morning. He said, over the phone, he would give her a go but, on arrival he claimed he had already employed a couple of people. It usually goes like that when they see she is Asian. Her face drops again and she becomes a little more despondent. The excitement she had when she got off the plane a few months ago diminished with every failed job hunting day. She did get a job offer as a private cleaning lady. The house, over one hundred squares, wasn’t that hard to clean, the owners spent much of their time in Europe but, the thirteen or fourteen something dollars an hour, award rate as she pointed out, was just to little. The lady was pleasant and Maggie seemed to think she was okay, her but the gap between her middle class social position, her wealth and whiteness was too intimidating for her uneducated peasant cultured background and she felt ‘small’ when she was there. Most cleaning contracts are per house. We were told by one labor hire firm ‘If you work hard you can get up to eighteen dollars an hour’, less your insurance, which they took out of your earnings for you. No holiday or sick pay. What a substantial hole the bottom end of our work force has to fall through.

The two Estonian chefs, on provisional visas, I met in the backpackers were paying one hundred plus dollars a week for a dorm bed. They were desperate for a company to sponsor them so they could stay. I wondered how bad their country must be to want to stay here.  A business owner showed me how to get the wages of employees on work visas down to ten dollars an hour.  ‘They’re desperate,’ he said. These Estonian men are not Backpackers. There is no affordable accommodation in Darwin for low paid workers. Here Backpackers are the scab work force of a bygone era. There short term take-what-I-can-get-and-leave supports Australia’s boom town and the Territories tyrannical wealthy. ‘Select’ recruitment agency called. Maggie has a start at Cullen Bay as a cleaner. It is over seventeen dollars an hour and overtime rates apply on weekends. She takes it. Jenny, the Chinese recruitment officer that handled her case agreed there was substantial racism in Darwin but she said, ‘The Company Maggie was going to work for was an Australian company.’ She said, ‘don’t work for Asians, there ruthless. That was my day. Dennis