Spinifex & Sunflowers Read online

  Roy wears on the other trainee guards. They wish he’d shut up. They wish Warren would ask him to read again. I wish he’d shut up. But I also hope he doesn’t. Roy is an original. He isn’t in the least average. He is so stupendously below average, he’s precious. So, yeah, Roy and I are friends.

  The next day’s training is shifted from the racecourse without any racehorses to an office in the big city. I spent three years in Perth, so I know my way around. To Roy, though, Perth is a concrete labyrinth. He manages to find his way to the office, where he makes a farce of the computer-based training, then when it’s quits he has to find his way to a mate’s joint in Claremont. Roy asks Nige if he drove; give us a lift, will ya mate? Apparently he didn’t drive. Roy asks Tom if he drove — just need a lift to Claremont. Oh, wrong direction. Roy asks Cynthia if she drove, but Cynthia is going in the wrong direction, too. The group is beginning to disperse and so Roy just starts asking the group as a whole, calling out, pleading with somebody, anybody, to give him a lift.

  They walk off. To the last man and woman, they walk off. Because I’m a bona fide saint of a man, I bother to hang around long enough to see if Roy is going to get a lift. I can’t give him a lift myself because I drive a motorbike and I’ve only got one helmet. With everyone else gone, Roy thinks he’s stranded. I tell him not to worry. He can easily get a direct bus to where he’s going if he just walks up the road; the bus stop he needs to wait at will say bus #102.

  Roy is nervous as shit, so I accompany him up the street, find the stop, wait with him, then deposit him on the bus. Roy is effusive. He’s floored that I bothered to stick around because, I realise, Roy isn’t like that twelve-year-old kid. Roy knows he is annoying and a bit fucked in the head and he doesn’t expect any help from anyone, ever, because that’s what he’s learned to expect in life. So I give him five minutes of my time and now we’re mates forever. Seriously, Roy thinks I’m great.

  I dunno what the point to that story is, but there is a point.

  TITS

  Chantal is small and cute. Cherubic face, nice tits. She’s only eighteen, or maybe nineteen, but, whatever her age, she looks young and talks young and acts young. She’s the best-looking female at training, so I try to flirt with her, but she is just so clueless that I literally cannot find anything to say to her that allows the spark of real conversation.

  Chantal is very earnest about one topic: being raped. Marilyn the Polish emigrant is forty years older than Chantal and she doesn’t want to get raped, either. I guess none of us want to get raped, but the rest of us are pretty blasé; it only really animates Chantal and Marilyn. They talk about it a lot. So Chantal asks Warren about getting raped in refugee prison.

  Warren does nothing to allay her fears. Even though we are in Western Australia and have no prospect of being sent to New South Wales, Warren tells us about an infamous client he heard about in a little suburb of Sydney called Villawood.

  This client is a bad man. An angry man. A very, very big man who doesn’t speak great English, just enough to threaten to rape any female client service officer he comes into contact with. Sometimes he threatens to rape the male officers, too. Warren tells us that the man has in fact tried before and will try again if given half a chance.

  So this is what Chantal takes away from today’s training: a big, deranged, angry Middle Eastern man with a dirty boner wants to rape you. I think this might colour Chantal’s impression of her “clients”, and she hasn’t even met one yet. I wonder if the refugees are having the same conversations about us.

  I still haven’t given up on flirting with Chantal, so the next day I sit at the same table as her for our lunch break. We’re talking about nothing, because that is all Chantal can talk about. I guess I’m just happy enough to be at the table, sneaking furtive glances at her tits. Chantal tells us she’s lived in Northam all her life. She says that she doesn’t know much about “things” or “places”. She’s saying that she’s not very worldly, which is actually the sort of self-aware comment that makes me think there may be more to her. Then she tells us that she’s never met an Arab. Then she says, “I’m probably a bit racist.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You know, just calling them ragheads and camel fuckers, that sort of thing.”

  She giggles a bit. I bite down on my sandwich and go back to sneaking glances at her tits.

  The next day, I don’t bother sitting at Chantal’s table for lunch. Talking to her is too hard. But I haven’t given up on tits, so I sit at Meg’s table, which is what we call her even though she introduced herself as Meghan, the version of Meghan with the stupid pronunciation that sounds like leggin’, like when you’re leggin’ it after eggin’ someone’s Corolla.

  Meg’s by no means unattractive, but her face isn’t as pretty as Chantal’s. Still, she has nice eyes, and nice lips. Not a bad arse, too, ample and amply round — likewise her tits. Plus, she’s talkative, the sort of talkative that drives itself without any outside stimulus, so it’s easy to be in her presence and look at her tits without overly taxing one’s brain. And I know that sounds terrible, like I’m a dirty lech, but it’s not as though I’m doing anything evil. I’m being affable while I look at tits. And either Meg doesn’t notice or she does notice and she doesn’t mind, because she starts to seek me out during breaks and we become friends. Which, by default, means I become friendly with her buddy, Scott, the gap-toothed dwarf with a pot gut.

  ROLES

  The last day of training is underwhelming. We sign a bunch of forms and get our uniform. It’s a blue polo shirt. I was expecting something more. Something prison-guardesque.

  I have a chat with Roy. He’s excited to finally get to bash some blokes and taser some blokes and rape some blokes. Thankfully, we aren’t issued tasers.

  Meg and Scott and pretty much all of us are excited about the money. It will be nice, there’s no denying it. Something like two grand a week, maybe more with all the penalties and allowances. I don’t think a single one of us here has ever seen that sort of moolah.

  But there’s also apprehension. None of us has ever met a refugee. We still don’t know what to expect — anything from normal blokes to deranged fuckwits. Of everyone, I’m among the most sanguine. I’ve read a lot, travelled a lot, watched plenty of documentaries, so I know that, for the most part, refugees are just average people with middle-class aspirations who happen to come from another country. I have sympathy for what they’ve gone through and wish they had better lives, but at the same time I’ve seen how letting an unending tide of refugees into a country can lead to horrible societal rifts like in France or Britain. Compassion is great — I’m all for compassion — but not at any cost.

  So, while I can’t speak for my colleagues, I have a fairly strong sense of how the next few months are going to play out for me. Basically, I’m going to go to my refugee prison in the middle of nowhere and try to be a nice guy because, even though I don’t want to encourage an influx of asylum seekers, I know the refugees who have made it here don’t want to be locked up and will probably be decent people. I don’t want to add to their misery. If I can do something nice for them, I’ll do something nice for them. But I’m not going to shed a tear, and I’m not seeking to change the world. I’m not Mother Conscience — I’m just trying to pay off an outstanding credit card balance from a trip to South America. Yeah, it’s not even anything exciting like a drug debt or newborn bastard.

  The fact is, I will become a guard. Regardless of what they call me, no matter how clever I am or how immune I think I am to societal rules and expectations, the moment I walk behind those fences I am a refugee-prison guard and I will become a refugee-prison guard. Even Dr Zimbardo got lost in the power trip and his performance as superintendent in the fake prison at Stanford. If I learned anything from reading his memoir, it’s that we act out the roles we fill whether we intend to or not — and I’ve just graduated from trainee to guard. Simple as that.

  WELCOME

  We get off a tiny steel lozenge on a street known as Derby Airport. A moist fist punches me in the face before I realise it’s actually a vicious flailing with a steamed lettuce before I realise it’s just the wind. A hot, sticky, suffocating wind that has the ineffable quality of weighing on you from all sides.

  It somehow manages to make my hangover worse and I silently curse Keely for forcing the last of his bottle of Johnnie Walker Black down my throat by telling me to not drink his fucking Johnnie Walker Black — and then promptly passing out. I take a swig of water from my bottle and breathe, deep as I can, as I gaze out upon a strange land.

  I was born and raised in a farm and forestry town in the south-west. I haven’t been back in five years, but it remains the lens through which I view the world. So when I see trees, I’m looking for the karri and jarrah giants of eucalypt forest. When I take in the sweep of an entire horizon of land, I’m comparing it to the hills and valleys of dairy farm and vineyard. And when I taste the air, I’m searching for the pollens and oils I know should be there.

  Here, all I taste is dust. All I see is dust — that, and low-lying scrub, the colours monotonous silver or khaki. But the real gut punch is the land itself. The flatness. It’s like old parchment laid over an earth-sized sphere. That may be great for attempts to break the land-speed record in jet engine dragsters; otherwise, it’s just alien and hostile.

  I climb down from the plane and collect my bag. A van is waiting to whisk us to the centre, which isn’t in town — it’s fifty kilometres south-east, even further into the dry, desolate interior.

  The drive feels long. There is nothing to punctuate the view. I certainly don’t see the picturesque white sands and cerulean waters that people visualise when thinking about this part of the world. That would be B
roome, the Australia of postcards and promises, two hours to the south-west. But we’re not in Broome. We’re in the shire of Derby, which, I’ve decided, is a shithole.

  Of course, these days, now that we’ve learned to cast off outmoded colonial ways of looking at the Australian strangeness and quit seeking reproductions of Europe, even places like Derby are meant to be unique and precious and hold their own special type of beauty.

  Right — and while the shiteaters in the tourism bureaus keep telling gullible Japanese and German tourists that, the fact is, I’ve landed in a unique, special type of shithole. It’s little wonder the white shirts decided to put a refugee prison out here. You get off that plane or bus and you don’t even think you’re in Australia. You think you’re in Africa, and I don’t mean the good bits.

  We pull onto a side road and cross a fence-line, pass some checkpoints that remind us the detention centre is situated on air force land, pass another fence, then pull into a parking lot. There’s a big sign that says “Welcome to Curtin”.

  I guess time is money, so, almost immediately, our induction begins. We’re introduced to chief swinging-dick Benedict. He’s one of the senior managers who spends time in the headquarters and around the grounds. He’s a big bloke, broad and thickset, obviously a formidable man back in his prime. He’s carrying a good few years on his face, and a slight stoop affects his posture when he’s standing, but he looks like he could still do some damage.

  I notice his hands. They’re like the hands you see on farmers who’ve done a lifetime of hard work under the sun — gnarled, leathery and heavy. He reminds me a bit of John Wayne, if John Wayne had been playing an old Australian drover.

  The words that spill from his mouth are sharp and clipped, his accent distinctly northern but not bogan in the way I was expecting. He doesn’t pause to take questions. He tells you something and you listen. Assuming we agree with everything he says, do exactly as he says and receive any admonishment without quibble, I’m sure we’ll get along fine with Benedict.

  He explains the basics. Tells us that we will need to be on guard at all times. How the clients are always stealing stuff. Are pointlessly obsessed with items they are not meant to hoard, as if at any moment the centre will run out of clean and hole-free undies.

  He explains that the average client is a not a bad man — not evil or anything — but almost certainly is a shifty bugger, just biding his time. That means the most innocent, pleasant conversation may actually be their working an angle to screw you over, to find an advantage. So, the number one rule is that you can be friendly with clients, but you don’t become their friend. You can have empathy for them, but not sympathy, because sympathy is a vulnerability that makes you a target.

  “What you need to remember,” says Benedict, “is that even with the nice ones, and there are some nice lads in here, you be friendly with them, but you never trust them. They’ll turn on you in a second, mark my words.”

  Benedict hoists his enormous frame upright. “All right, follow me. I’ll give you lot a walk-through of the grounds.”

  We pass through a series of fences and gates into the compounds where the detainees are housed. We’re told there are just under one thousand clients in Curtin, all men, yet walking around we see no more than fifty. Those we do see look pretty chilled out. They don’t look like rapists or psychopaths or devious masterminds. Just some darker-skinned dudes in thongs, track-pants and t-shirts strolling along, smoking cigarettes. It could be a drought-stricken town in Bali.

  The occupational health and safety manager shows us a thermometer, destroyed after it topped out in the high fifties. Up here it’s hot like you are on the surface of Venus. Hot and humid. The buildings, almost all transportables like those in mining camps, are disjointed and ugly. The gardens, where there are gardens, aren’t going to win any prizes. The outside communal areas tend to comprise concrete slab, tin roof and a few wooden benches. Taken together, it’s little wonder most detainees sleep the day away to emerge at night, or simply hide in the air-conditioned interiors.

  That said, the place is not particularly fearsome or intimidating, not authoritarian or controlling in the dystopian way some would like to believe. There are lots of tall fences topped with razor wire, but apart from that it’s just a really shitty bush camp. Not pleasant, but hardly a gulag.

  JOIE

  Roy is in my ear. He’s like a little kid, excited to be seeing new things and places. He’s got this irrepressible joie de vivre. And that’s exactly how I would describe Roy’s outlook on being a refugee-prison guard.

  “This is what you do, mate. You get a taser and give it to him, tell him it’s a phone.” He puts it up to his ear. “‘Hello?’ Then zzzzt!”

  This is mental, but funny, and Roy is on a tear.

  “‘Excuse me, officer, can I have some milk?’ Zzzzt! Zzzzt! Twenty thousand volts. That’ll sort ’im. ‘Oh, hello,’ knee him in the head. Nah, shouldn’t say it, should I? Whack! Zzzzt! Nah, seriously mate, they should give us all tasers. Could just come at you, couldn’t they? Need fuck’n guns. Bang, in the knee caps. That’ll fix ’em.”

  We’re at the back of the group, but I tell Roy to pipe down. It’s probably not the sort of thing you want to be yelling out within hearing of managers and refugees. Roy doesn’t get it.

  “These bastards, could be anyone, couldn’t they? The Sri Lankans — Tamils, eh? Never know, do you? Should have shotguns.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Roy.” I shake my head, though there’s a smile on my face.

  Roy looks at me with a sweet, innocent, curiously blank gaze, before going on to elaborate his thoughts about cavity searches vis-à-vis a pneumatic cock-on-a-drill. There’s no doubt Roy is fucked in the head, completely deluded and will probably get himself fired, but I can’t help but think that he’s a good guy and needs a break.

  We complete our walk-through and induction, then it’s back on the bus and to our accommodation. Half of us are being billeted at a spot called Spinifex City, the other half at a motel in the Derby township where some dongas have been dropped in a car park and now they’re charging taxpayers a small fortune to house Curtin staff there.

  I’m staying at Spinifex City, and I’m glad. I’d rather be surrounded by bush — even Derby bush — than by bitumen. Spinifex City is little more than a block of red dirt carved from the tussock grass and scrub, sporting about sixty transportables and a few communal buildings. I get my own room, a little cubical with air conditioning, a TV, bed, tiny desk and tiny fridge.

  The bus driver takes us the three or four kilometres into town to get some supplies, as we’ll be providing our own meals. I buy bread, cream, coffee, cold meat, spam, a roast chicken, cheese. I go halves in a carton of beer with Roy. I think he’s a bit skint, and it’s better value for him to buy in bulk.

  We crack one that evening and sit around with a bunch of the other recruits from Northam. We’re still not entirely sure what being a guard means, though we’ve an inkling it involves a glorified form of babysitting. We’ll find out for real tomorrow.

  MICK

  A bus picks us up at 5 a.m. Only half the new recruits are working dayshift. The others are on nights. We switch over after a week. I guess I won’t be seeing much of Chantal and her tits, nor Danny, Nigel, Alfred and a bunch of others with whom I was on pretty good terms. At least I’ve still got the irreverence of Roy and the tits of Meg.

  As the bus stops at the various pickups, the seats fill. Soon enough a chap plonks down next to me. Being new, I know it’s a good idea to make friends with a few of the more experienced guards. I extend a hand and introduce myself as Nick.

  “G’day Mick,” he says.

  “Nick.”

  “Mick,” he repeats, as if we’re just confirming what we both already know.