Perth Dreaming

Hey all. So here is a picture of my room, at the cattle station. It did not have a door, just a doorway, or more of a rectangular opening in the tin panels. Also please note my chair had no seat. It was too hot to be in this room inbetween, say, 7 in the morning till 9 at night. Fortunately, I was usually working between those times. Quite often though, there was a break between 1 and 3 o'clock, when the temperatures make working unfeasable. Where we were, looked like the other picture. All red sand and scraggly tree type plants. It was around there 45 degrees in the shade, at the hottest part of the day. Later in the summer it was to get hotter, but I have escaped back to Perth. I am also to take the next available train to Adelaide, but this is not for another 10 days or so, not this sunday but the next. Apparently it is peak season right now. So what else? I'm still happily vegetarian, being on a cattle station, where beasts are brought into being for to die for money, has only strenghthened my resolve not to eat meat. Seriously, this is what Ben, the operator, told me about live export. He said, and I have no reason not to believe this, that Australia has the most humane conditions of live export in the world, these happy (here I am incredulous, seeing as they would be happier if let alone) healthy, cattle, sheep, and goats (the muslims eat a lot of goats, some ramadan shit, and there are a lot of muslims, 300 million in indonesia alone) arrive at the market city on their nice ship, and then they are abandoned to the terrorists. Ben has seen this. The market people will do the following to the animals. Remove the eyes with sharpened sticks so they are easier to control. Kneecap it so it can't run away. Then they sell it to families who drag them home, and feed it up until it is time to slaughter it for the feast. And you can be quite sure they are not killing the animal with a pneumatic hammer or anything quick and quiet. I don't care what anyone says about the natural way of things, that is cruel and not necessary. Oh, and another disturbing thing I found out is that when baby goats are being crushed to death by a panicked mob of bigger goats, they scream desperately,(for a while) and it sounds literally like a human child screaming. This I experienced first hand. So I'd rather pick fruit or some such.

Bloggin her...

Well. That was a hell of a thing. I'll put up some pictures, but for now, suffice it to say that I have escaped, and none to soon. The place was a cattle station, and right off the start the boss there had it out for me. I think it was because I was vegetarian. Honestly, this was the worst job I have done so far, made all the more so because it could have been all right. Anyways, I'm going back to Perth tomorrow, at least I made enough money to justify the trip, about 2000 k's worth of travel. I'll make a full report on the shit when I hit the city tomorrow. The pictures make the story more enjoyable.
I shaved my beard off.

Keith in Australia

I've been down that road before. And now I'm going back up it. So I won't be doing any caretaking. I've taken a 6 week post on an outback station, as a general farm hand. It's 1000 k's back up the coast the way I came, but I don't mind because the pay is good enough and the job sounds like fun. I get to ride a motorbike around chasing after goats. The lady who hooked me up with the job said it was one of the funniest things I would ever get to do in this country. I really hope it is. So I'm probably not going to be near a computer until I get back to civilization sometime around the new year. Wow. Now that I write that the new year seems so close, just 6 weeks away. When I left it felt like an eternity. I'll be missing some birthdays. Ashley's kid's zeroth birthday, which must have just happened, or is about to anyways. How come nobody celebrates your zeroth birthday? See you in 6 weeks.

This is a farmhouse on a Sandalwood plantation.
I spent a few days here picking up sandalwood seeds for $18 an hour. That's pretty good, considering (there was 4 of us) that he fed us, put us up, and bought us lots of beer. He asked me if I wanted to live here for a few months as a kind of caretaker. He still has to hammer out a few details, but it might happen. I've gone back to perth, to cash the cheque for the 3 1/2 days work, but he'll call me tomorrow with an offer. I'll totally take it if I can make enough money to last me a good while, but if not theres really lots of other work around. What else is around, is locusts. lots of them. Officially it's a plague. I hope that doesn't ruin to much cropland, cause then it might be hard to get work. We'll see how it goes, I will be working within the next 3 days regardless. When I went into the job shop I got to pick through the job offers. So anyways, I'll hit up this blog before I leave the city again, because as you might guess, the farmhouse has 2 tv channels, one phone, and zero internets.