Due to the average pay for freelance writers in Australia, I moonlight as a disability support worker. My job takes me all over Perth’s southern suburbs, particularly the Cockburn Gateway area (aka the zone of intersections). There I drive my clients between Hungry Jacks, the youth centre and ice cream parlours, or between the two service stations, one of which a client believes sells “exclusive” Chupa Chups.
What’s remarkable about this Möbius strip of merging lanes and outlet stores is the baking heat it manages to conjure, even on an average 25-30 degree day. Like a lot of Perth’s snaking suburbs and shopping-carpark gulags, there is little to no shade here, and beneath the traffic’s churn of SUV exhaust fumes is an ever-present, oh-so-radiant heat.
Last week, on a shift that coincided with one of Western Australia’s record-breaking heatwaves, sitting in an ice cream parlour with busted airconditioning, something within me finally snapped. It’s too damn hot. It’s too damn hot, I tellsya! People can not live like this! This is bullshit! Fuck this, fuck you, and fuck the god-damned sun!
As I considered committing harakiri with a waffle cone, staring at me from across the road was a billboard advertising offshore mining jobs by way of one of the benevolent megacorps that rule over my fair state. Woodside, Rio Tinto, Twiggy Forrest: these innovators, entrepreneurs and encephalopods have spent the better part of two decades blowing WA to kingdom come for untold billions, with the promise of a mortgage, chronic fatigue and the biggest flat-screen TV imaginable to anyone who’d help them get the job done.
And here we are, baking in said job’s final days. Half the shade looming over the closed shopfronts of Perth’s boiling CBD is cast by the office towers of mining giants. Their branding is on every public work, politician and pauper’s grave, their logos carved into the sacred landscapes of the state’s north, east and south, with all the vicious enthusiasm of a FIFO Aldo Raine.
It is impossible to separate the legacy of the boom — the wealth, the piss-ups, the TVs — from the inevitable heat death of climate catastrophe. It seems impossible, also, to extricate WA’s soul from what is a global apocalypse. We’ve played our part like a chubby little merchant in a tawdry fantasy series: the gleeful miners who dug too greedily and too deep until they awakened the Balrog of the Anthropocene.
Despite actively protesting, picketing and writing defamatory screeds about Twiggy, Gina and co over the years, I feel a scorching sense of culpability from merely being Western Australian. It’s as though in not trying to run their giant trucks off the road with my Suzuki Jimny, I am somehow a co-conspirator. I am left with a sense I should have done more, that I could be doing more, that it is time to go bickle-mode on these swine.
This anger, this grief, this mania — it roils within me as I step into my client’s pizza-oven houses. The sense that “people can not live like this” is not unique to them, me, or anyone panting through this oppressive heat. For Western Australians, our state, our capital city and our impossibly sprawling suburbs are soon going to be unlivable, or exhaustingly expensive to live in. Anyone living in a traditional Midland Brick suburban two-bedroom will tell you this: the heat feels fatal, they can not sleep, they can not think, they have to run their aircon (if they have it) all day (if they can afford to), and there’s no escape.
How do they think this ends? Is it right that the state’s poorest are the frontline victims of the mining giant’s karmic reckoning? What will be their punishment, when we’re forced to relocate Mandurah, Bunbury and Geraldton into the mega-pits they dug, just to grab that last bit of shade? How will they rent out their investment properties when those units, bungalows and converted government housing are reclassified from homes to kilns?
Have I gone troppo in this heat? Most definitely. But the truly troppo truly see things for what they are, and this is a death knell. We are at the lip of a crumbling canyon, frozen in slow-mo in the first moments of tumbling toward oblivion, and there’s no safety net, work helmets or hi-vis uniform capable of stopping the crunch coming our way.
Is everything ok over there, WA? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
