Meekatharra and the Tyranny of distance

You ever wonder what the end of the earth looks like? If you do then I have an immense concern in regards to your knowledge about how the world functions and gently encourage you to dissuade yourself from flat earth theory and towards a more logically sound theory: The idea that the world revolves around me, the writer. Now that you have moved to line of thinking make sure to read the whole article so that you can be closer to nature (me) as the new green revolution is the only economically sound option.

Distance is tyranny.

That is a running theme I have encountered a lot in my life as a Western Australian. It literally pervades the space around this state. Everything is so far away, out of reach or barely within one's grasp. We are often forced to choose our choice of travel carefully. This is even more so the case in the days of old in WA, when Model T’s were the newfangled thing and pandemics were even more annoying as instead of having to wear a mask you had to die.

 Like a lot of die. 

Spanish flu was rough, man.

You want a place full of examples for Distances Tyranny? try

Meekatharra.

known as the end of the earth, and hometown of land rights lawyer Jeremiah Riley a small gold mining town on the Great Northern Highway. Its gold levels were third rate, Never to the degrees of the Victorian or Kalgoorlie goldfields - certainly not as many gold diggers of either persuasion in Kalgoorlie, home of the Questa Casa -  but respectable nonetheless. When you think of finality you don’t think of a place like that, but people always like to picture biblical things to illustrate their points, when realities can just as often be banal.

The end of the earth is often cited in history as a devilish place of foreign extradition or simply a pit in which to fall. And those medieval people, in spite of their lack of knowledge, their mind set on the pressing matters of a fallen Rome and unsettlingly insecure food supplies, had such little idea of how right they were in their pig-headed assumptions of what will soon lie beyond that dear and endless ocean of seas.

Who would travel to such places after all? Answer: Only the most committed bums on earth.

Gold prospectors. the only thing that distinguishes them from the sad and lowly gamblers of a Rural New South Wales Casino is that instead of sitting in a climate controlled room pulling a lever, they are doing strenuous work in some of the nations hottest weather and most isolated climate. 

Those who prospect waste away entire lifetimes in what is ostensibly a gamble for gold, Like the lotus hotel in the Percy Jackson novels they don’t even realise time going by. There was once a prospector who was digging for gold until the age of 84 and didn’t even realise until he went to the doctor because he found out he “couldn’t lift like he used to” after failing to heft a 95 Kilo man out of a mine shaft. 

Why take the gamble? Why separate yourself with miles and miles of dirt and dust? My family in Newman had many reasons. Sometimes it is to get away from people and the troubles they accommodate, sometimes it is a matter of isolation and its powers to amend concentration. Mainly, though, a person moves North for the money. Nowadays it is for a wage, back then it was for gold.

When gold is the purpose of a gold town, it attracts those that consider the substance above all else.

There was once a Sardinian man named Luigi who ended up at the hospital in Meekatharra. He had appendicitis, which of course is a normal condition to have - and on an unrelated note was once performed with no medical equipment on the Thai-Burma border by fleeing Australian POW’s. The more you know. Reading is fun kids. - What the doctor found in his appendix was a dozen grains of gold. Ever since that operation the people of Meekatharra gave Luigi looks of desire, and not of a sexual nature. or maybe sexual. I am certain most people there would have an gold kink. There was talk about melting him down for his gold, with the assumption that his entire body would contain a very bountiful amount of metal money. When people started asking Luigi where he intended on being buried, as the video game character of his likeness would be, Luigi had grave concerns about the opening of their future burial place, going to the local constable to tell him of his worries.

The constable replied “it would be interesting to know how much gold--” and Luigi left the police station quickly, purchasing a shotgun.

Check this story out, its a blast!

Weird things can happen in a small town full of veterans and mining explosives. The common saying with explosive weapons is that close enough is close enough.

One time someone tried to blow up the Meekatharra road board with mining explosives. Have no idea what might have pissed off the returned soldier who did this, as the road board, which is what the shire and city councils used to be, is probably only responsible for two roads, one of which is likely the pubs driveway 

I can imagine the pub's road builder said the following: “yeah, we call this one curvy road because even though IM schur I built er straight, Iss fooking cuuurrrbyyyy” 

They found the man who set off the explosives via the fashion of the time, Aboriginal trackers - known as black trackers - which people considered having uncanny abilities that no white man possessed at the time such as the mystical art of looking at the ground and going “look ere, budge, footprints, we can use them here to track the man who did this”. Awareness for how the land functions is certainly a magic in its own right.

The roads may stretch long distances, but they are thin. My brief experience of the eastern roads that stretch between the two capital cities of Australia are multi-laned and laced with surrounding buildings. Few people in the northwest are as easily accessible, but when you do need them, you know exactly where they are.

What’s a mining town rundown without a Pub Crawl?

A 13 year old girl was lacerated by a broken water bottle (in those days they weren’t made of those pansy plastic materials, they had materials with real chest hair, such as metal and probably asbestoslytised lead) She needed a blood transfusion due to the severity of the cut. Meekatharra had only one available donor at the time, which they called upon to give. 

All's good then? While they were stitching the child back up post-transfusion, she was giggling and yodelling like a mad lass, which although might seem normal these days if you’re a particularly energetic twitch streamer, was unusual back then. Turned out that the donor had been called upon from the pub. She got drunk off blood. Fully recovered mind you, except for the hangover. Most 13 year olds get drunk by stealing people’s cruisers, but I have never seen a kid game enough to drink someone’s blood! Except maybe certain goth girls, but they aren’t doing it to get on the beers that’s for sure.

These stories, as casual as they are, provide examples of a make do mindset. Using what is had at one's disposal. This can be dangerous when suffocated.

Desperate people, far from a world that cares, must rely on their own sense of self, physically and spiritually. Making them the perfect victims of perverted thinking. The building of the canning stock route in the colonial days of Western Australia are one such example, with emulations and repercussions that extend even to this day. 

Steal a generation to close a gap in the distance between one place and another.

It is said that Your time in Meekatharra was not judged by the number of years but by the number of summers spent there. A statement that is pertinent these days to many of the FIFO mining towns like the one I grew up in, where Summers are deader than a Jigalong dog.

The cost of traveling the distances to the nearest centres of people in WA is high. Even accounting for the lack of jurisdictional problems it is still hundreds of kilometres of land to traverse, dozens of litres of fuel burned, yet people still chose to pick their times almost every summer, their limited choices of movement a migration south.

Reading about Meekatharra had me pressing in my head constantly. Something I overheard my mum say a few years back. We were in Albury-Wodonga, it was my first and  as of writing only time in the Eastern States. The kind of trip trip tandem in Rural Westralia to travel overseas, with a price to match. We chose this one single trip over east for the first time in over a decade because the father of my mother - my grandad - a man partially responsible for engineering the train tracks of the Pilbara to be appropriately equipped in handling the record breaking weight of kilometres long Iron Ore trains carrying away the distance inducing red dirt to foreign shores, had died. a man who I regret to this day in my youthful ignorance never taking full advantage of his decades of collected technical and likely philosophical wisdom. Who’s legacy left in me is little more than this train-patterned tie and a book on the Prisoner of wars of the Thai-Burma railway, of which his father - my great grandfather - endured. I remember overhearing my mum, who would later burst into tears mere minutes later as she carried her fathers coffin, confide to another bereaved of that Tyranny of distance that separated her from her Victorian family. That Tyranny of Distance. I will never forget that phrase uttered from her mouth, as I sat in the first family funeral I ever attended, but far from the first that was had. There are few things I am confident I will never forget. My memory is fickle and the flashes from my childhood are fleeting and esoteric. 

I Believe we should be pushing our power upon this tyranny. That the narratives of tomorrow must be defined by the gaps we close rather than the holes we dig.

There is a true narrative that can be told through the lens of the Sandgropers struggle against the dictatorship of distance. An emotional, empty, and tense struggle of being left alone for so long. Whether it was the small gold rush that created the end of the earth, or a simple mining gig, The north has to offer endless dirt, down, around, and in your hands.

thank you for reading this article. I wrote this when I was enthralled by the ability of some comedians to communicate deep and emotional stories within their routines, and what better subject to try this style on than the light-hearted and heavy handed world of remote Australia? If you enjoyed this article please consider checking out what I am doing in the present via either my Facebook page or my Discord server. 

BONUS! let us finish this Meekatharra adventure with little shanty poem from the place long ago:

They tell the story in the north, the sames in every southern mouth

Of how two drummers ventured forth to dare the desert and the “drouth”

The heroes of this grim romance are known by name of king and krown

They faced the bushlands wild expanse some hundred yards from my town

They took the trail on which as yet no human foot had ever been

Their object was to safely get to meekatharra from nannine

Tis said the trackless plain was then the haunt of dingo and bugarra

(ah, fate deals unkindly with men between nannine and Meekatharra)

This journey of a score of miles, this distance so sublimely vast

Provoked in king and krown but smiles where others would have stood aghast

One traveled for a grocer firm, whist liquor was the others lay;

Just ponder on that torrid term of hard-ship served by K. and K.

Outback requires to drink and eat, to get it's groceries and grog

It but regards this wondrous feat as just like falling off a log

It asks impossibilities, mere human effort won’t suffice

Oh would that there were more of these and less of human sacrifices.

Let's follow them upon their way, and see them bridge that gruesome gap,

It may be pertinent to say that king was sharing krownie’s trap

They left Nannine and journeyed thence without

compass or a guide,

a

Until they struck the rabbit fence, the gate of which

was open wide.

They crossed the bunnie's boundary here, and urged

their brumby through the scrub;

Undaunted still, and minus fear, at length they

reached the Half-Way Pub.

Resolve was still upon each face, not absent were

their starting smiles,

Thus far they'd set grim fate the race - they'd travelled

now a dozen miles.

They here refreshed the inner man, and likewise fed

the inner horse,

And then their final stage began, another dozen was

the course.

The moon was shedding silver light upon the spinifex

and sand,

The track was looming wide and bright to

Meekatharra near at hand.

The buggy, rudderless and frail, upon that desert sea

was tost,

'Twas duly blown from off the trail, and King and

Krown were duly lost.

But dauntless still these drummers twain went on and

never thought to quit,

And proved upon that puzzling plain their British -

cum - Australian grit.

What reck'd they of bleaching bones, the bones of

travellers ableach,

The skeletons of brave unknowns who failed to

Meekatharra reach?

All danger to them was as naught - they didn't fear the

hostile blacks.

They put away the chilling thought of travellers

murdered in their tracks,

Thus K. and K. defied the hordes of Fate and Satan:

on that day,

The drummers were the overlords, doom was no

match for K. and K.

They asked each other what it meant, and answered

each in manner fine;

'Twas but the midnight wind that sent icy feelings

down the spine.

 Where were the Meekatharra lights that should be

shining just ahead?

What's left of man when dingo bites - is he not

numbered with the dead?

Why, which and wherefore, whither, whence? where

is the broad and moonlit track?

Ask of the brave old rabbit fence to which they now

had circled back!

They knew not which side they were on, nor where

their destination lay,

The bright old silvery moon still shone, the breeze

still spineward found its way,

From fear they bravely held aloof, though slightly

whiter grew their hair,

(The rabbit fence was dingo proof, but not upon the

side they were!)

Resignedly they laid them down, and wondered what

the dawn would bring.

And King consoled his comrade Krown, and Krown

gave cheer to brother King.

Remorselessy at 9 am the burning sun upon them

burst,

And terror then encompassed them, 'tis horrible to die

of thirst!

There was no water in the trap, there was no sign of

any trail,

But Krown said "King, cheer up old chap, a Briton's

never known to fail."

11

"You take the trap and slowly drive along the rabbit

fence that way,

"While oppositely I'll contrive, and watch for water,

King, and pray.

They planned to travel just an hour, defiant of the

thirst and heat,

And after this, if they'd the power, they should retrace

their steps and meet.

Now when an hour had slowly sped, King saw the

object of his quest,

He spied a water cart ahead, soon had a gallon neath

his chest.

He watered poor old Krownie's horse, (refreshment

there to man and beast,)

And backward then he shaped his course, to tell his

comrade of the feast.

And joyous were the songs he sang, and for the storm

and stress and strife

He didn't seem to care a hang - quite thankful that

he'd saved his life.

Now, when that trysting place he reached within that

weary wilderness,

He found his wretched comrade beached upon a shore

quite waterless.

But joyful tidings King had brought: he told his aqua

pura tale,

And gasping, Krown the gargle sought, "Why, King,

lad, I can drink a pail."

"Hand me the water, quickly, King, or I shall soon go

raving mad!"

"Alas, no water did I bring - I quite forgot the water,

lad!"

"I'll fetch it now - keep up your pluck- the water cart

is very near."

"Till then 'twill ease your thirst to suck this button off

my waistcoat here."

No need to scrutinise the cause of sounds that rent the

morning air,

No need to question nature's laws - for dying men

athirst can swear.

It never came, (though it was nigh) the time to pray

for Krownie's soul.

A man from "Eight Mile" now came by upon his after

breakfast stroll.

The situation soon he seized, and thus the drummers

heard him say,

"Join me to 'Meeka', I'll be pleased - it's just a yard or

11

two away.

The tale is scarcely finished yet, we haven't reached

the final scene,

Though we have shown the way to get to Meekatharra

from Nannine.

King's banter somewhat nettled Krown, he said to

"

King "Turn up that laugh."

"Tell not the tale in any town - I deal in whiskey, not

in chaff."

Before they parted King had sworn that he would hide

the secret deep, 

But e're he'd seen another morn he found the secret

wouldn't keep.

The human breast is very frail; King "worked" the

line ahead of Krown,

And everywhere he told the tale, in camp, in hamlet,

and in town.

He told it where the gold is spent, he told it to galoots

and gluttons,

And everywhere that Krownie went they offered him

some waistcoat buttons.

They offered them in every pub, whene'er he went to

have a wet.

And when he sat to have his grub he found them in

his serviette.

His taunting torture was immense, with waistcoat

buttons he was cursed;

In dreams he saw the rabbit fence, and King's device

for quenching thirst,

But then the tragedy bore fruit, and now no hardship's

ever seen,

When drummers go by trap or boot to Meekatharra

from Nannine.

The Road Board got to action quick to safely guide

the travelling hosts.

And now the Nannine track is thick and blossoming

with finger posts.

And that no traveller be killed or lost through missing

any sign,

The Government's resolved to build the Meekatharra

railway line.

Now guideful soon will be that way (the welcome

news has reached each town)

So that in future drummers may avoid the fate of

King and Krown.

Yet still the tragedy's rehearsed, throughout the State

its records ring,

And still with buttons Krown is cursed, still laughter

circulates with King.

They tell the story o'er again from Nor'-west to

southern jarrah,

Of what befell those drummers two between

NANNINE AND MEEKATHARRA.

Jean Dell. 25-12-1909