hree months ago the
decision was simple – well, not so simple. Starting a new life in Australia as
a lowly paid factory worker with a family of five to depend on that pay, and
after only 48 hours in the country was not necessarily an act of desperation. I
could easily have opted for unemployment benefits, considerably higher than the
factory job paid, while looking for something more appropriate to my training
and experience. But I did not want to lose a moment to find out, in order to
find myself in a relation to the land of OZ, whether Australia was the proud
and clever country that its politicians say it is.
The factory, the heart and soul of the industrial religion,
was my second choice as a first step in the journey ahead. I wanted a job with
the garbage collection department – an almost impossible aim, being new and
non-union and from the wrong part of the globe. It would have been perfect to
discover the biggest former penal colony in the world through its backside.
My decision was a conscious act of commitment
to a new way of life. I am a migrant, an Oriental from a non-English-speaking
background. The young fair woman at the Commonwealth Employment Office asked me
if I could speak English. I said yes. She looked at my job qualifications as we
talked. She was a nice person. But slowly I began to understand from her other
‘employment officer’ person, that by some weird logic of the system my
extensive university studies and teaching experience were nothing, nothing more
than figments of my imagination. Why? Simple, because they were obtained from a
non-English-speaking background and therefore non-existent, or at most,
inferior.
She apologized. Equal employment
opportunity is government policy and there is no racial discrimination in
Australia. “But what can I do? That is the rule. By the way, there is a factory
demand for a general hand at Kirrawee, if you are interested”. We stared at
each other for a moment. We both laughed. She arranged an interview for me with
the factory. I got the job on the spot.
A master’s degree in philosophy, ten
years teaching in the academy, and being 46 years old, are not exactly the
right training for a factory peon. The first month was hell. But I soon became
intimate with every fibre in my body and sharpened my knowledge of human
anatomy. Nightly, I could name the several hundred muscles and bones in my body
by the same number of aches and pains. By the second month I was fully enjoying
the job.
The factory building was a formless and
ugly prefabricated structure, like all the plants sprouting like pimples around
Sydney. Inside was dusty, noisy and unhealthy: freezing in winter and boiling
hot in summer. The name of the game was profit, fuelled by cheap migrant
labour. The company produced speakers for stereos and public sound systems.
In two months I was a good factory
hand. I could assemble the components with my eyes closed, spray paind the
wooden castings, pack them into cardboard boxes and load them onto big trucks
while humming ‘Waltzing Matild’ and not miss a beat.
It was by the end of the third month
that I paid more attention to what I was handling. As I worked on the assembly
line I noticed disturbing signs of the state of the Australian dream. The
woofers and tweeters were made in Taiwan, the amplifiers made in Hongkong, the
screws and drivers made in the People’s Republic of China, and the big plant
machines bore instructions in Nippongo. Only the wood and the labour were
Australian. It dawned slowly on my unbelieving mind that the ‘clever’ country
was a myth. Australia was going down the Argentinian road, a fetcher of water
and a hewer of wood for the industrialised nations of Asia. The signs are there
in that factory.
It was Friday. It was payday, always my
favourite day these last three months. I drew my pay. I walked leisurely from
the factory through the main street of Kirrawee, part the ugly factories, the
shops pregnant with goods, the banks and their sharp-eyed moneylenders, the
bottle shop doing its usual Friday double time, the silent apartment houses,
the concrete steps down to the railway station. It then occurred to me that
this was the last time I would walk this familiar road. I had made up my mind
that moment that there was nothing more to learn in the factory.
The station. The train arrives. The
hard seat. The train moves. I continue to ponder over my three months spent in
the factory earning my daily bread and a beginning that they were also spent
looking forward to its end and the start of something new. Now jobless, I grew
uneasy that I have done nothing to make the new life more real. Only my walking
out of the factory had reality. I felt cheated and betrayed. Three months lead
to the myth and a seat on this train. Were it possible for me to fix this train
on its tracks, to extend its present rails to eternity, to defy space and
gravity, I would have done so. I would then stay rooted on my hard seat, close
my eyes, drain my strength and passion, my mind empty as my idiotic grin, and I
would stay there, timeless and unnumbered, unregistered and unknown, bothering
no one and no one to bother me, travelling forever and ever between my past and
my future.
###
It
was another one of those long weekends, so I decided to get lost in the city. I
chucked my umbrella and a bottle of water into my backpack and draped my camera
over my shoulders, put on my runners and went out to a cloudy Saturday morning.
It rained a few minutes after I went out so I had a big use of the umbrella. My
plan was to walk and find my way to the city’s Fort. Along the way, I passed
Galle Face which surprisingly, despite the rain, was enlivened by a few, mostly
couples, promenading or sitting in a romantic embrace on the benches along the
beach, protecting their heads with umbrellas from the rains that continued to
drop in trickles. Luckily, the rain
later on let up and the sun started to shine bright and hot.
In
my efforts to find the fort, I ended up in naval restricted areas but was able
to take some good photos along the way, retraced my steps back, discovered some buildings of European architecture and then got
lost in a maze of narrow, busy side streets selling all kinds of merchandise
from fruit drinks to chocolates to saris. One can get drowned in the multitude
of products that one can buy here – just don't forget to try their delicious
thirst quenching fruit shakes. It takes all the heat out of your body.
As I
did not know where I was, I just got on a bus, dared myself to get back to my
apartment using this public transport. Very luckily, I guess I got on the right
bus because 10 minutes later, I saw a familiar place that I knew was just 10
minutes by walk to my place. I got off and walked the short distance, realizing
that one cannot get lost in this city after all.
