(I broke-up this ride with a night in Katherine. Which meant a six hour bus trip from Darwin to Katherine the first day, then a seventeen hour ride from Katherine to Alice Springs the next. If you follow along on a map the route went from Darwin, to Katherine, to Birdum, to Tennant Creek, to Alice Springs.)
The fires outside Birdum1 made the already impossible red landscape redder, adding glowing rings of red fire to a dirt red ground saturated with red termite mounds, and red smog to the sunset red sky.
That cinematic entry, after four hours of unchanging but dramatic scenery, fit Birdum’s prominence on past maps — long a solitary dot in the Australian outback, a distinction earned only because cartographers loathe voids — quite an achievement for a truck stop at the center of a vast governmental zone housing maybe fifty full time residents.
This night however the single truck stop was buzzing, its dining room full of truckers in their high-vis jumpsuit uniforms gossiping over steaming plates served by sweet Vietnamese ladies, and an actual queue at the front desk, of FIFO2s (temporary workers) checking into the motel, their names scratched off one by one from a list provided by the company they were to be attached to for the next six weeks.
There were eight in the line, all expressionless, inured, dressed in similar well-worn high-vis outfits, with rucksacks stuffed with rig tools and clothes slung over their shoulders, all had clearly done some version of this before. Maybe not in Birdum, but in some other dot on the Australian map. Six had come from my bus, four had gotten on with me in Katherine (where I’d spent the prior night).
I’d found them sitting in the sliver of shade cast by a sign, their work gear scattered around them. They were friendly, but spare and weary men, who when I asked them where they were going mentioned a name not on the map, then shrugged and said, “some oil town” when I asked where that was, and when I pushed further and asked where they had come from they said, “Some other oil town three days away.” When I pestered them even more, one pulled out papers, scanned them, handed them to me, and said, “they tell us where to go and we go” and when I tried to act in the know, and said, “I was just in Perth and there is a lot of oil there….” one interrupted me, and said, “There is oil everywhere in Australia mate” and went back to staring straight ahead and that was that and I went back to waiting with them in silence, all of us watching an aboriginal man splayed out in a circle of shade on the sidewalk yards from us. Two made bets on if he would move when the sun inching towards his head hit him, and when it did, and he got up on his knees and crawled a few yards towards the center, yawned, and plopped right back down again, money was taken out and exchanged.
We had stopped several times prior to Birdum in equally minuscule towns, mostly to drop off cargo from the hold and attached trailer, the larger source of Greyhounds revenue than us riders, but a young Indonesian woman did get off, with five large trunks, at one of the stops, to work at the restaurant attached to a gas station, a hardship move from her prior job in Darwin which she explained would allow her to stay a third year in Australia.
In Birdum we picked up a new rider, a sullen man whose baseball cap (with the single loud word “CUNT” written on it) suggested I should probably leave him be, to sleep the remaining twelve hours to Alice Springs. That wasn’t the obvious thing to do, since everyone else on the bus all knew each other, chatted often, or at least acknowledged each other, a result of there being so few of us, the length of the ride (twenty-two hours from Darwin to Alice Springs), and the general friendliness of Australians. With the loss of the six FIFOs, and the young woman, Cunt-hat joined myself, the two drivers (who alternated sleeping in back and driving), half-sisters accompanying a rambunctious child headed from Katherine to Alice for a funeral, and three aboriginals, two a couple heading back south to “the bush to be with their family”, the other a single man also headed to the bush because he “needed to dry out”, although the bottles wedged in his backpack suggested his commitment to that was tentative.
The bus's mix of temporary workers — both Australian and immigrant — alongside aboriginals, mirrored the demographics of the outback we were driving through, at least in spirit. It is a region of the transient, because while the aboriginal residents are born, raised, and live there, they are also constantly moving between bush communities and the cities, a physical manifestation of an identity suspended — and often fractured — between a sixty-five thousand year old legacy of bush tucker and the reverence of nature, and a modernity of McDonald’s and cases of Victoria Bitter.
Katherine, where I’d spent the night after riding from Darwin, was like that. Half the population had come to work high-paying jobs there, mostly in mining and/or the massive farms irrigated by the aquifer beneath the town. The other half are aboriginals, who while they do “come from there”, what that translates to is that every few weeks they catch a ride into Katherine from the bush, to hang in the McDonald’s, or the small mall adjacent to the bus stop. But mostly from what I saw, to binge drink in the Katherine Hotel, a cavernous block sized bar with bouncers from New Zealand, swollen affable Māori men drawn by the exceptional pay (“The highest paying policing job in Australia!”), who are effectively school marms crossed with prison guards, constantly monitoring who is allowed to drink that day, and exactly how much, and who is currently on the banned list.
For my twenty-four hours in the town, from the second I got off the bus until I got back on, I was approached by aboriginals on the wrong side of that list, asked to buy them liquor, or by those temporarily on the good side, for one more dollar to buy one more drink. Each of them was polite mind you, friendly, with a sense of humor about the situation. Walking through Katherine wasn’t a case of continually nagging desperation, of hard-edged aggressive begging, but more one of constant tentative requests, of being swarmed by melodic and harmless gnats. None though — not the drunk nor those presently denied being drunk — seemed to have a job. Which clashed with the rest of the town, which was industrious. Including the young Indonesian woman at my hotel who came to Katherine to make money to send to her parents, something she had to do since they were farmers and she was their only daughter, and that’s just what you do as a child. You go abroad, work at whatever job you can get, and then also go to night school, to get a degree so that you can eventually earn enough for them to retire. Did she like Katherine, Australia? Yes, she liked both, but she hadn’t seen much of either since she didn’t get a lot of time off and she really didn’t know that many Australians since she lived with friends she had made since arriving, and all of those were like her, but from Vietnam, China, and Sudan.