No TV program on Aborigines is complete without some shots of badly groomed and maintained houses in a dusty township somewhere. Take your pick. Queensland, WA or the Northern Territory. Everything looks ragged, untidy and dirty.
That includes the cars, the dogs and the people.
I just can't figure out why. They've got scheme water, mains electricity and well built houses.
When I was 12, I spent a few weeks working on a sheep station in the mid-North of WA. It was miles away from anywhere - right out in the sticks. Driving to the front gate took half the morning, let alone going into the nearest town. It was isolated as buggery. The water came from a bore, and the only way to heat it was in a wood burning drum. The first thing I had to do each morning was to get up at dawn and light a fire under the hot water system.
They had a diesel generator for power and some solar panels and a big battery bank. They killed their own sheep every now and then, but most of the food in the place was tinned or dry. I don't think the power was reliable enough to risk having a lot of food in the fridge or freezer. All we had was powdered milk. I still can't stand powdered milk to this day.
We worked hard - it was mustering time, and we mustered sheep all day, and on the days when we weren't mustering, we worked in the shearing shed. I learned how to pick up and throw a fleece, and how to drag sheep out of the pens for the shearers, and how to pick off the yucky bits of wool from a fleece, and how to press a bale using a manual bale press. I was pretty handy with rolling big wool bales through the shed and out onto the loading dock.
It was a pretty hard existence. The shearers lived out of beaten up caravans or the shearers quarters, which were a dead basic tin shed on a concrete slab.
In short, the owners of that sheep station put up with a crappier class of facilities than are found in most Aboriginal communities today. And they put up with it willingly, because it was their livlihood. I do not recall anyone complaining about having to cut wood for the hot water system, or the yuckiness of the bore water, or having to swap out the big gas cylinder for the kitchen stove. The diet was monotonous and air conditioning - pfft! You wish! Air conditioning consisted of driving around in a Land Rover with no roof, and folding down the windscreen to get more air (and flies) in your face.
I seem to recall that most of the beds had chicken wire for mattresses.
I did need a bit of medical treatment during my stay. I slid my motorbike into a bore drain and it landed on my leg. The exhaust pipe gave me a lovely burn. Treatment consisted of keeping it clean and putting some sort of ointment on it. I survived without having expert medical attention nearby.
When I think of how hard that family worked, and the years of effort that they put in and the conditions that they happily put up with, it really makes my blood boil when I think that the taxes that they paid go into communities where all the money and effort in the world just sinks into the dust and disappears.
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