This (Remote) Life*

* submitted to The Australian for publication

Last night, fifty wild camels came to watch basketball opposite my house. There was no-one playing. The young Aboriginal fellas who usually play late into the night, stereos blasting in their battered Holden Commodores, had gone home. No-one likes to be out in the dark when mamu (evil spirits) roam.

We saw the camels at midnight, just before the streetlights switch off. It’s hard to know how long they were there, drawn in by the scent of water. More often, the camels lurch around the airstrip, causing problems for the ‘doctor plane’ and my partner, Fred, who has to set out the airstrip lights by hand.

Even the water they sought was a mirage. The night before, Fred and I were zooming out to the only working bore, 18 kilometres away. The water had stopped pumping again. There are three bores for the community. Only one is working. The contracted electrician who services the bores and power station for our region of over 250,000 square kilometres in remote Western Australia resigned five months ago. There is no one yet to replace him.

Hastily filling buckets before we left, we prepared for the worst. Days without water in the searing heat of a central desert summer. Only this time, with a large ‘sorry camp’ on the edges of the community, and community numbers swelling for the funeral later that week, no water would be a disaster.

I started to wonder about evacuation plans as I filled the sink to almost overflowing. The aged care centre in our community has water tanks, but hardly enough to last us for more than a day. Our store, which was built 18 years ago when the community had 50 people, is too small to meet even current needs, let along hold emergency bottled water. With a community of over 200 residents and growing, and more than 300 mourners, we were stretched to the limit.

To make matters worse, while Fred was digging the grave for the funeral (he’s a handy chap), the powerhouse went down. Again. Too many old air conditioners, working at peak inefficiency. This was the fourth time the powerhouse went down this week. There are three diesel generators. Only one is working. Thankfully, Fred has done this a few times, so with some advice on the satellite phone, we were back up and running.

In fact, running over the border into the Northern Territory on a 400 kilometre round trip to collect the mail bag. It had been left behind in Alice Springs by the weekly air service. We hurriedly arranged for it to come out on the ‘bush bus’, but that service stops at the border. Mail bags are the top priority, along with medicine for the clinic. Unfortunately, not everyone in town understands this when deciding what has to be left behind. The box of pamphlets we got instead were not nearly as important as the family payment cheques. Many community members rely on this to make it through the weekend, with their per capita incomes the second lowest in Australia.

While we were collecting the mail, we called into the local government business manager’s office, and sounded him out on possible changes now Labor is in power. Rudd says he is interested in the infrastructure needs of remote communities. Perhaps the real costs of servicing the powerhouse and bore might be realised. More importantly, perhaps we could finally get some funding for the new store, so desperately needed here in Wanarn. In the meantime, the camels advance closer, our store gets smaller and we wait.