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)