The world's greatest supermarket

About life in OnSlow and working in the world’s greatest supermarket

I already explained that Onslow is far from everywhere else. In addition, there is not that much to see and explore on our days of (one day per week) around here either. Or so you’d think. Onslow didn’t always used to be where it is now. It was first built by the mouth of Ashburton river (about 20 km from the current location) but for several reasons, including the fact that cyclones and storms kept destroying it, it was moved. So the old town site is one of the main attractions around here. Basically it is a network of gravel roads (or gravel paths) in the middle of very low bush (like the rest of the 100km radius around here) with little notice boards beside the roads where you can read „This is the place where that and that building was, this and this person built it and later it was taken there and there“. So there are no actual buildings left and the current Onslow does not have them right now either. Some material was used in other buildings, some were (partially) restored somewhere else. But after long driving and reading the unbelievable information about the buildings (and seeing literally nothing) there are still 1,5 buildings left.  But there is a nice picnic area on the way to Old Onslow that actually has shade (there usually are some trees around rivers), so we spent most of our trip out of town there and going to Old Onslow was worth it despite the lack of things to see as well.

Everyone kept telling us how this is the best time to see wildflowers. Generally about 7-9 months a year the northern part of of western Australia is dominated by sand and yellow and brown remnants of plants. But during the winter, it turns green for some months and at the end of winter, out of nowhere, fields of colorful flowers appear. All thi is very great, but as we found out if the visitors centre, the most amazing ones are mostly south from here or even more north. So with only one day off, there wasn’t really a big chance for us to see them. But we did go out of down to a gravel road (4wd access only) that went through an area that was painted brown on the map, which indicates aboriginal lands.

We did see some small wild flowers as well (patches of yellow, purple and white) but we found some much more interesting things. As soon as we turned onto that road, a big 4WD came, passed us, stopped, reversed, stopped right next to us and the people in the car (aboriginals of course, two very ghetto-looking young guys in the front, a young thin woman and a not-at-all-so-thin and not-very friendly-looking older lady in the back, and a very big fella at the very back) wanted to know where we were going and advised us not to get lost. After just a few hundred metres we found an abandoned car by the road that was beaten up pretty bad (probably just for fun) and went to see if we could get anything useful out of it. we got one speaker but nothing else because we had left our tools at home. (we returned later for the radio and other speakers... luckily noone had burned before that) In the next two minutes we saw two of three more abandoned cars, but they were already old and burnt. In total, we found about 6 cars in the 30km that we drove on that road.

The newest of the abandoned cars

After about 25km we saw some tyres lying around on the field, and well... because we can drive anywhere then we had to go and see. And what we discovered was not only a field of tyres, it was field after field after field after field. And it was not (just) a dumping point. Someone has clearly arranged the tyres – in most places the distance between any two tyres was 2,5-7 metres, so someone had intentionally been spreading them in seemingly random way, but definitely spreading them, because they were not in piles or anything. Some where also noxt to each other in a row, but that was the minority. So after drifting a bit between the tyres we thought about going back but decided to go on for a couple of more minutes. Suddenly there were trees and even a river appeared, with the sign „Kane river“. Well... it was a river in the rainy periods, right now there were just little ponds of water where the river usually was. After crossing the river we saw a bush camp by the road. There were some sheds and shades built from random pieces of metal and wood. When I saw the ’village’, I suddenly remembered that I had seen the name „Kane river“ before numerous times and t was one of the abo communities that sometimes came shopping in town and I often had seen their name on the list of accounts (will explain about it probably). The indigenous people around here are not particularly happy about being taken pictures of so we did not go close or take any. But we did decide to drive up the river a bit and saw some shades built by the riven that we caught on camera because we were filming the driving. (by the way we will put together some videos as well some day, because we have a lot of material... the first one is almost ready). We also climbed a small hill on the way (of course with the car) and saw fields on termites nests that were mostly higher/taller than a grown up person is. The termites’ nests have actually been dominating the landscape ever since we came north from Carnarvon. The other people that we live with with were slightly surprised that we found things to see that they had not even heard about (talking more about the tyre-fields and bush-towns than the termites nests).

Causeway over Ashburton

In the middle of tyre fields

Stubby holders are a must here

Cane river

Just another one...

The home of termites

Anyway... since we do spend most of our time in the fabulous general store, then some typical moments about that. Everything I write about is about the specific people who go to our store. So when I say ’the caravan people’ or ’the aboriginals’ or ’the miners’ etc. then I don’t mean all of them but I mean some of the specific ones that come to our store. but these are some of the most outstanding pople from the general population. So I hope that they don’t take it personally.

Every Wednesday afternoon and Sunday morning is delivery day. That means that all the people work on that days because we have truckloads of stuff and practically no storage space whatsoever. That means that all the aisles are full of boxes and ladders and people running around. Plus we have more customers on these days as well because well.. you know... it is delivery days and all the things that we ran out of, will be in stock again. Or at least that is what they hope. Actually I don’t know how this works but someone keeps ordering random things that we don’t need and keeps not ordering more of the things that are actually popular. So for example some breads run out the first day while there are huge piles of other things. The same is with cigarettes - since I’m in the registers then I have very close contact with that part of the store. A client comes in „Could I have a pack of winny blue 30s?“ „Sorry, we’re all out“. „What about Winny gold 30s?“ „Sorry, no 30s. But we have one pack of 20s left“ „Naah... what about PJ gold 30s?“. „Only have PJ red 30s“. „I’ll have the PJ blue 30s then“ (the number indicates the cigarettes in one pack, it can be anything between 20 to 50 cigarettes... at least in our store)

And then there are of course those, who make the whole situation even harder by forgetting or not understanding things: „Can I have a pack of PJ gold?“ „Sorry no PJ gold or PJ blue“ „I’ll have a pack of PJ blue then“ „We are out of both PJ and Winfield blue“ „I’ll have a Winfield 20s then“ „No winfield blue“ „A pack of Winnie 25s then „ „No Winfiled blue in any size“ „Give me a PJ gold then“... and so on

In Australia, people do not pack their bags themselves. It is the job of the person in the checkout to pack the bags while the person is waiting and watching. The bags can not carry a lot of weight and break quite easily (a bit bigger and about the same strength, if sometimes not weaker, as the bags that you put your fruit and veg in in Estonia) so I pack A LOT of bags in a day. Some people do not care a all: „Just put the 2l milk on my cookies, no worries“. Some people are very specific about how they want their things packed and they constantly keep correcting you when you put something in „the wrong bag“. You can usually recognize there people and then it is a matter of secretly learning to read people's faces. So I take a juice, put it in a bag. Then I take the sugar and start putting it in the same bag, if the eyebrows start to frown, I quickly get a new beg and pretend that I was always going to put the thing there. One time I put a small box of strawberries (6 strawberries in a box for 5 dollars) on a bag of chips. And the lady got very angry at me because I was ’crushing the chips’. When I told that to Erik, he started laughing at it, because he sees how things are handled before they ever get to that lady’s bag where the strawberries may break them.

A lot of people have accounts in our store. They are mostly some workers that buy under the account of a company or they are representatives of the abo communities. When the workers come in they unload two-three trolley-fulls of stuff on the counter (they have about 30x30cm of space for the stuff on the counter because our wonderful managers keep piling boxes of different sweets on the counters which I keep graciously knocking down every day) and spend thousands of dollars. And I pack all the tings in about 20 different bags.

Since we are in a town that has a lot of indigenous people in and around it, I can’t leave them out either. There are some that are really quite nice (apart form the smell... they are used to living in very different conditions than we are... and I think that they either can’t smell themselves or do not care... but either way the showers and them really are not the best of friends) and who I actually get along with and chat. And then there are those who really don’t want to get along with you. For example for a lot of the caravan people or others as well, it happens that they already start paying, they remember something that they forget, they apologize at least a few times and then they either tell me to stop scanning their things or say that „I just forgot the milk, I’ll be back in 30 seconds“. Anyways they kind of feel bad about it and they let me know, how long they’ll take.

And then there are those indigenous people, who want to make you feel like you are the worst worker in the world. They look at you in an angry way and keep tapping something on the counter nervously while you are serving the previous customer. (I’d always like to ask „I will come and see how fast or good you are at your job... if you didn’t just get money from the government“). And then when it is their turn, they start counting the little 20 cent sweets, that have been in front of them on the counter the whole time that they were ’In a great hurry’ and calculating (not actually calculating but having me calculate) how many they will get for a certain amount. Or they will go and bring some more soft drinks and have me wait for them again.

A lot of the indigenous kids don’t go to school either. So there is a law around here that we can’t serve any school-aged kids during school hours (unless they have a card that proves that they are just on recess and are actually going to school). So the local kids generally can’t read or calculate or, it seems to me, can’t realize the concept of money at all. So I have little angry kids yelling at me every once in a while promising that ’their mother will come and bash me up’... which of course has never happened. I haven’t even met an angry parent yet. When it’s not school hours the kids are not supposed to come in in groups, only one by one... but that is something that the managers can do themselves if they really care about that.

At work we are not supposed to ’stand around and do nothing’. Stopping for 10 seconds and thinking about something counts as doing nothing, so we constantly have to be in action. Our wonderful managers Sharon and Sam are looking at us from the security cameras even when they have a day off or are at home. So generally we either fill up the cigarette cabinet, clean around the checkouts, check the trolleys and bring them back from the parking lot or organize things of do something similar. And then there are days when all the cigarettes are filled, everything is clean and there are no people in the store. When that happens we just go around and try to look busy (very often actually doing random things) once I asked my workmates how their afternoon had been and one of them said „We have just been going around and touching things for hours“. It is usually not that slow though. There are days when all the trolleys are randomly around the centre of Onslow because noone has time for that.

But yeah... I am more and more surprised every day how much junk people consume. It is no problem for a person (both indigenous and white) to spend hundreds of dollars on sweets and colorful drinks. And they don’t mind that the 0,2l coke is almost the same price as the 2l one... they like the small ones.

I know that it may seem from my post, that I do not like Australia or Onslow etc. That is actually not the case at all. Onslow is the friendliest place where I have ever been to. The people all know each other and get along. I have had long conversations with some of the indigenous people and get along with most of them quite well. There is a community garden with a large wood-heated pizza oven which is free to use; there are free workouts of football, basketball etc every week and so on. I once saw a freestyle rap battle in the sports club (a bar in the midde of the sports facilities) between a somewhat crazy aboriginal lady and a white-haired old rich looking white lady. So Onslow really is a nice (and quite interesting, considering the size) place. It is just a very different experience to live in a place like this with people like this. And Australia as well... apart from their food culture and their Aussie slang, that is often difficult to follow, it is definitely a place worth visiting... why else did we come back here.

Life On-Slow-Mo

Our caravan-park life only lasted for a week. But it was nice – we already got to know our neighbours (for example we had a very cool old guy with his dog living in an old bus re-built for living. The bus even had ’an office’ and a built-in washing machine in the side of the bus. the guy had been building mufflers for motorbikes all his life. At the moment he was building a muffler for another bus – a lady was living in a bus with a pink stripe with „attitude“ written on it) and the workers an so on. But it was a bit tiring to live in a tent (sand, grass, morning dew, passing cars, people watching tv with a very loud voice etc...) plus only one of us had a job. Moreover I found out if I have work or not the same morning. So two times I woke up at seven, showered (hot water, cold water, hot water, cold water, cold water, cold water, cold water), ate breakfast and made my lunch only to find out that there was no work that day. And even on the days that I was working, it was often only 4-5 hours.

So now we are living in Onslow and both working at the Onslow General store. I am mostly in the checkout registers and Erik is carrying boxes and doing other stuff. The job seems reasonable enough and the money is quite good so we will probably stay for at least two months because right now we’re running out of money (buying a car and everything needed for travelling in Australia plus actually travelling around Australia has taken its toll). Onslow is a town of about 700 people. The closest actual town is Karratha in 321km. The main highway (North West Coastal Highway is 80km away) The next closest thing is a roadhouse, a few hundred kilometres away but well... it’s a roadhouse, not even a village (fuel, 20-dollar burgers, accommodation and a small shop). The weather is warmer than in the south and there are crocodile warnings everywhere (because seven years ago someone saw a crocodile here once. They are not really something that you expect to see here). Onslow has one grocery store, a pub, a restaurant, a library, a hardware store and a post office. In the shop you can buy frozen kangaroo tails, for example (with hair and everything) but everything sold is very expensive, especially anything fresh. The town is on aboriginal lands and there are a lot of them is and around the city as well.

About a hundred years ago it was still legal to hunt and kill aboriginals so the relationship between the government and the white locals and aboriginals is a bit complicated. Basically they are given houses and money to live on (rent for using their land, paying out of guilt because of how they were treated...) and they just do that. The problem is that they are not used to some of the things that we have. Europeans have a long history of consuming alcohol and their own traditions that go with it plus all the modern stuff, like junk food has come into our lives step by step and we know that it is bad for us. Aboriginals can’t really handle alcohol well and they just LOVE junk food. Especially anything that is red (litres and litres of soda, any any kind of sweets) and they don’t care much about vegetables, the main (olmost only) food that they buy is meat (why waste money on grass, if ou have onough to eat meat, right?). So right now there is a bit of a dilemma – the food and drinks of white people are not doing much good for aboriginals but since they are considered to be equal to everyone else now, they can’t be denied anything anymore either. I’m sure that it’s even more complicated as that, but right now that’s how I have observed it.

So we are living together with other backpackers who work in the store (one German, two English, one Scottish, one Italiano and two French, who are leaving today).

Anyways, there probably won’t be much happening in the next few months but I will take some time one day to get into some things that are different or strange in Australia (for example, everywhere else in the world, they have ’speed bumps’ but downunder they have ’speed humps’) and maybe soon I can get my internet to work enough to upload a few more pictures (either here or to facebook)