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.
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It’s beyond shocking that these Mining/Energy execs can literally (and knowingly) destroy the planet without consequence, yet a young protester charged and sent to jail for the act of contemplating throwing paint on a fence of Woodside mining CEO’s mega-mansion. Surely knowingly destroying the planet should be considered a crime far greater in magnitude. Protesters are arrested because the cause public inconvenience, well I wonder how inconvenient a flood, heatwave, drought is? Surely much much worse. For so long as we suppress and persecute people with the courage to stand up, whilst protecting the true criminals – we’re not going to progress much.
The anger and blame is pointless. It distracts us from the grief we should be feeling as we learn to accept the inevitable and prepare ourselves for the great transition, when a world supporting 8 billion humans, changes to one supporting a few million, if we’re lucky. It’s coming soon.
Resignation is as bad as anger and blame, Rev. If you mean we’re all gonna die, we already knew that. It’s the absence of icecream and cold beer that keeps me awake. Feed for the horse. Had a crocodile sandwich once, tough. I’ll look for some black people and hope they’ll take me in, way to go. White man’s dreaming – as in they’ll tell me I must be.
I think anger and blame is utterly appropriate. And grief too. We should be demanding that the greedy be held accountable and made to try and clean up the mess they’ve made. But short of armed revolution, which I’m not really into, I don’t know how that could be done.
It would help to redue the heat if councils weren’t wilfully choppin down any shade trees that exist. there aren’t many, as several WA council areas I have lived in, think that trees are the enemy if they are too tall. Putting in underground power lines would solve many problems of the trees being too tall. I had a council that approved/required total land clearing to build a house, then turned around and told me to plant a tree in a particular location on the block. just 1 tree and only in that location.
I don’t think all councils understand that if you shade the ground you have cooler living conditions.
The concluding sentence says it all….. while the rest of the developed and developing world move ahead, the Anglosphere is still addicted to fossil fuels, global warming, dark heat absorbing bitumen roads and car parks, larger cars & houses while basic environmtal science, urban design and amenity is ignored eg. tree cover and the significant cooling effect….
But as long as trees block views, drop their branches and extend their roots under footpaths and car parks, people will complain to the councils and the councils will feel compelled to take action. Too many people are all in favour of “nature”, as long as it doesn’t interfere with them.
“I feel a scorching sense of culpability from merely being Western Australian.” You are not along Patrick, I was having a similar conversation this morning, and it is hugely dispiriting to feel so powerless and cynical all at once. Temperature reached 53 degrees the other day, the air itself was scalding, but still every tree must be destroyed, every mineral dug up. The “mining giant’s karmic reckoning” will, I have little doubt, be paid by us while the oligarchs laugh.
With all this increasing trapped heat and fierce sun. What with the proliferation of bigger and bigger twincab utes, the most popular colour for them is now black, everything black including the trim and the wheels and often towing a huge black caravan. Are we devolving now, are we getting more stupid? Seems so.
All the houses with black roofs is my bete noir (sic).
Who can not see the sheer stupidity of that?
Apart from town planners, council officials and thousands of home owners.
Well Patrick, not sure how old you are but I’m 68. Sorry to post so late but have just retired to bed and opened up Crikey. Been recovering today from the oppressive heat with more to come. Lucky me can afford the power bill to run the air-conditioning. Yesterday, was talking to my brother, Patrick, who resides in Karratha. We agreed that the big miners should be stumping up far more royalties than presently paid. When some of these agreements were made, nobody envisaged just how many tonnes were going to be dug up each year. The royalty payments should be levied like our tax system. The more you dig up, the more you pay. If you don’t like it, find another country. I enjoyed reading your article Patrick.
When I said enjoyed, I meant I agree with what you said. I enjoyed the fact you are so passionate.