Joe Jezioranski

Now that I had no job it was difficult to wait for the conclusion of the red tape associated with the proceedings before emigration. Each one of us had difficulty with different part of the procedure. I couldn’t stand all the paperwork required. Kajtek had difficulty spending time with his new girl Irene. Charlie got very upset at the medical examination: the doctor was a woman and Charlie stood in front of her naked with his hands covering his genitals until she made some indecent remark. Others were just bored or annoyed.

Finally the day arrived when the Australian consul was going to interview us. We waited most of the day outside the building in which his temporary office was set up. While we waited we were listening to the radio. At the time the top tune was Nature Boy. I think we must have heard Nature Boy about twenty times before I finally got in to be interviewed. He asked my nationality, how I got to be in Germany, what I did while in Germany and finally why I wanted to go to Australia. To which I replied, “To make money, I guess.”

He told me I was the first person he signed up for emigration. He claimed that he was sick of people telling him stories about suffering, communism, love for Australia, and felt that he finally found a sane person.

Despite this very impressive speech, I still had to wait another six weeks. In the meantime my friends went through a second interview, which I did not have to go through because I was signed up at the first interview. Finally the lists went up, giving the names of those who were selected to go in the first transport. We were happy that some of us were included in it and not very happy that others weren’t. This was the first time for a couple of years that we were separated. I don’t know why I felt a certain responsibility for a number of my friends; maybe it was because I had looked after their interests for a while. I worried whether everything would go all right with their transportation. Still, all of them were now in the final stages of emigration. There was no point asking to go in the second transport since some of my friends, Kajtek and Joe, were allocated to the first one as well. So I decided to go.

We still had to undergo some final examinations, issuance of temporary passports, travel documents, and then we were loaded onto a train going to Italy. Why Italy? Nobody knew.

The most important possession Kajtek had was his Robot camera. He loved it so much, he could not decide to take pictures with it. Most of the pictures were taken by Joe. Pictures of the departure, pictures of the Alps, pictures of the border inspection, pictures of the Italian plain, pictures of the camp near Torino. And so we were waiting in another camp, in another country.

We were quartered in an old Italian army camp. The barracks were built as multi-story buildings and provided a spacious and well-lit living area. The bathroom surprised us, equipped with glazed porcelain fittings, toilets likewise – but a toilet was only a hole in the floor with pads to put your feet on. The glazed porcelain fitting and a hole in the floor of the fitting seem somewhat grotesque. We were also surprised to find urinals at the corners of the busy city street, without any enclosure whatsoever.

We were warned not to move very far, as we may be on our way again soon. We did not have very much money anyway.

We managed a few trips to town, walked for hours. It was the end of summer: hot days, beautiful nights. Watermelons on ice sold in the streets; girls and boys parading in the evening through quiet streets; shutters in the windows, protecting the room from the noon sun and open at night with people looking at the evening traffic – a different environment.

We sat until early morning drinking wine in a garden of the trattoria, under vines drooping with grapes; old men telling us tales of war and sorrow. We had little money, but wine at the equivalent of ten cents a liter was just what one needed to drink in a quiet garden during the warm summer night. It made waiting for transportation in a foreign camp more bearable.

Back in the camp during the day with nothing to do but wait (cannot move too far away, transportation may be called any minute!). The meals broke the monotonous day: tomato soup with macaroni at lunch, macaroni with tomato sauce at supper – a rather unimaginative menu.

Luckily it lasted less than a week. We were packed into a slow train again. The train moved through the mountains at first and then down the coast. Hot day in early autumn, beautiful blue sea, clear yellow sand, almost empty beach during the midday heat, and closely packed houses on the hillside on the other side of the train. The train moved very slowly into Genoa and rattled finally into the port, next to a mid-size ship. It was SS Kanimbla, built for coastal traffic in Australia, now still serving the Australian Navy. It had not been decommissioned since the war and was used to bring Australian troops home from the wars. This time it carried ratings for training in England and was coming home empty. The government decided to use it to transport a group of immigrants home. We were checked slowly by the Italian authorities and packed into beds arranged in triple layers throughout all decks of the ship.

We left in a hurry. Apparently some of the sailors got involved in a fight on the shore when accosted by a group of Italian communists. Some sailors were wounded. When the captain noticed the group coming home carrying the wounded, he carried out his own inquiry through which he found out that there were a number of Italians “left on the battlefield,” and he immediately asked for permission to leave the port. I guess the final resolution was left to the diplomatic channels, but I noticed a number of sailors remained “in the brig.”

Next day Naples – what a smelly port, the whole place smelled of dead fish. Then the straits of Messina and we sailed quietly through the Mediterranean. Joe was taking more pictures: some fishing boats, just waves, faces of the immigrants, ship’s bow, ship’s starboard side, ship’s port side, sailors at work, sailors at play…

It was stuffy inside, so I decided to sit right in the front of the ship on the bow. There was a nice breeze and a marvellous view. I did not get thrown out from the exposed section until we reached the Indian Ocean and the weather got rougher. For the time being I enjoyed the view, the feel of airflow, and the sun. Whenever I went inside I could read – the ship had a nice little library. Or we walked along the decks watching the sailors work or play different games. The food was plentiful if not exciting and one could always sleep in the air-conditioned compartment.

Before we even reached Port Said we were met by an armada of merchant boats. The merchants were willing to buy, sell or exchange anything at all, while making some unusual claims about the value of their merchandise. The haggling was amusing even if we had nothing to deal with.

The Suez Canal was a bore. Suez was a smaller version of Port Said. In two days we reached Aden. There was nothing to see in Aden. The temperature reached 140°F and drinking water was more expensive than beer, while beer cost about five times as much on the shore as one could buy it for on the ship. We were glad to get on our way the next day.

We traveled directly from Aden to Fremantle. It was mostly an uneventful voyage except for one storm during which the waves rolled over the top of the closed ship. I slept through most of the storm and exasperated my shipmates by asking whether anybody would like to donate their breakfast to me – most of the immigrants were seasick all night. We were disembarked and cleared through the customs in less than three hours, which seemed pretty decent to me. A group of buses took us to the camp near Claremont, which lay halfway between Perth and Fremantle.

Here we waited again. First we were issued some sort of Australian documents, then a suit of clothes, then some very limited amount of money “on account” [55]. It was hard to administer the few shillings we had while we were suddenly thrust into civilization – well, at least approximately normal conditions. The clothes certainly made life more bearable. At least we were no longer stopped in the streets by well-meaning people asking us in broken English whether we liked Australia. Broken English, in the belief of the indigenous people, is the language that each newcomer must understand. It goes something like this:

55. The money was going to be paid back from our earnings once we started working.

“Oh hello! HEH-LOW! You new immigrant, capish? Immigrant?”

“Good place, eh? Australia good place? Verstehen? Capish? You new Australian – GOOD!”

Of course if one answers in reasonable English, it creates a great disappointment: “Oh you speak English, how nice. Nice weather we’re having. Well, good-bye!” and you are quickly left alone, providing of course that you admit to “liking Australia.” Otherwise you’re one of those bolshies, who after being given “all those opportunities” and amassing “all this money” at the expense of “our poor people,” displays such gross ingratitude. You should be sent in a ship to the deepest part of the ocean and dumped overboard.

Obviously we should have tried harder to bring some money with us. We had to be careful not to use buses, not to buy any junk food, not to accept invitations to go for a beer – somewhat tragic when you are 19. There was one man who had a garage in Germany – his name was Stefan. Stefan had a bit of money, which I helped him to convert into Australian pounds. He would often pay for outings.

Our stay in the camp near Claremont did not last very long. Soon we were sent to work in the quarry near Roelands. Roelands was a little village in the southwest of Western Australia. The quarry was situated about three miles above the village.

Everything in Australia was so different from the central Europe with which we were acquainted. The weather was much drier, and the seasons basically consisted of the dry and rainy seasons. Australians distinguished four seasons but even after spending six years in Australia I had difficulty in identifying spring and winter. Since the climate was so much warmer and drier and because of ecological separation, both the fauna and flora of Australia were significantly different from the European environment. The social conditions differed as well, probably because of the lack of variety in the population.

For most of us there was a difficult period of adjustment. Some, especially affected by the war, did not adjust well. I remember one of our friends who became slightly mentally deranged after a couple of months. He complained continually about the conditions, the way he was treated, and developed a real persecution complex. The Australian immigration authorities found him a job in a hospital, where his duties were limited to light cleaning and he was always near to professional help. I must admit that we avoided his company, not only because we were somewhat ashamed of him but also because he was such an awful bore.

The work at Roelands was heavy but not difficult. Most of the work consisted of loading pieces of rock onto railway cars and platforms. One had to select the right piece of rock to fit into the space available on the railway car, then slip the chain around the rock in such a way that it would be balanced when lifted by the crane and ensure that the rock slipped into position on the car. One of the most important aspects of balancing the rock on the chain was to position it in such a way that the chain could be slipped into the right position to hold the rock. Often this required using a steel bar as a lever. Other times crane assistance was required prior to lifting the rock to be carried to the car. This work required a lot of strength and good timing. I had neither. When the rocks were loaded onto the railway cars, they were taken thirty miles away to the small town and port of Bunbury, where the West Australian government was building a tide breaker.

We lived in tents next to the quarry. As it was the Australian “spring” when we came, it was a very pleasant arrangement. The tents were situated under the gum trees, on which millions of parakeets and kookaburras would settle in the morning and wake us up with their laughing noise and chatter. We shared the tents with goannas and snakes, but as we did not realize that some of them were supposed to be deadly, we learned to tolerate and amuse one another.

When we got up in the morning we would wash ourselves in the common trough, next to our kitchen and dining room (a wooden structure), where the water was provided by a big storage tank. The Public Works Department, realizing our limited resources, started us out by extending credit in the local supply store. The food supplies were brought by the little train that carried the rocks down the hill and returned the empty railway cars up the hill. To go down, often the locomotive was not required. One could bring the cars down the slope “riding the brake.”

One man from our midst was selected as a cook because he claimed to be one. He did a reasonable job, although at the beginning he had difficulty adapting to the supplies common to most Australians but somewhat different from what a Polish cook would be accustomed to. Once we adapted the recipes somewhat, and especially after we let one of our men set traps for rabbits, we were not only fed well but also very cheaply.

The man who set our rabbit traps was a poacher in Poland and had a fantastic ability to catch the wildlife. I learned from him to wash the traps thoroughly after each use, place clean paper on top of the trap set and cover it lightly with soil by brushing it with a twig. Traps were set at the rabbit holes appropriately selected. The poacher claimed that some holes are just sham exits and the rabbit never uses them. Others were the main exits and would be abandoned if disturbed. Finally there were alternative exits, and those were the best to set the traps at. If he set a dozen traps he would average four rabbits per set.

We ate rabbits in the morning, at lunch and in the evening. We ate rabbits in all possible ways you can eat poultry – rabbit meat is white. Since my time in Roelands I have hated rabbits, chicken and similar poultry.

As I was not doing very well in the prime type of work at Roelands, I tried to change my job. A shaft was being drilled somewhat away from the face of the quarry in preparation for dynamiting the quarry’s face, thus creating additional supply of rocks for the Bunbury tide breaker. Above the shaft a platform was built holding a rope tackle supported by a steel, three-legged stand. The rope was pulled by a small air-driven winch. My new job was to operate the winch. It was a very relaxed job. Most of the time the men who were sinking the shaft were drilling the holes below and I read a book. They would only require my assistance when they needed to come up or needed some supplies below or needed to take out the rock from the shaft. In this last case one of them would work on top while the other one was filling the bucket at the bottom of the shaft.

I must say that the men were very forgiving, as I did not do my job very well. For one thing, I tended to fall asleep often; for the other, the bucket had to be pulled up carefully, and I would often hit the sides of the shaft with it, thus causing little rocks to fall down the shaft where the men were working.

My worst sin happened when I was bringing a man up slowly while he was examining the walls of the shaft in order to make sure that they were safe, ie would not shed larger rocks to endanger the workers at the bottom of the shaft. The man would stop in midair and examine the walls, sometimes prying the rocks loose. Then he would call to be pulled up a short distance at a time. Whereupon I would start the air slowly while disengaging the brake. The air pressure would first take up the slack and then slowly pull the bucket up.

At one point I forgot to start the air before I disengaged the brake, and I had the clutch loose: the bucket dropped some ten feet before I closed the clutch and then the brake. The man just managed to hold onto the rope but he obviously got very frightened. When he come up he was ready to punch me in the nose, but slowly recovered his composure. I tried much harder after this incident, but I must say that I never mastered the art of operating a winch.

My other job was to act as an interpreter for those of the Polish men who could not yet speak English. I thought I did this job rather well until a new group of Polish migrants arrived. One of the men in the group had a Master’s degree in languages. Unfortunately he had such an awful accent that nobody could understand him. He did, however, know English much better than I did, and would complain bitterly about the mistakes I made in my translations.

Although the quarry appeared to be isolated, it was not very hard to get back into civilization. Once one came to Roelands, down the hill riding the brake or simply walking some three miles, there was a railway from Perth to Bunbury and the bus. The railway was very slow. It was mainly concerned with cargo – passengers were incidental. The bus took about half an hour for a trip to Bunbury.

Our early trips were mostly to get tobacco and cigarettes – these were still rationed. Other items subject to rationing were butter and tea. Still, the only rationing that we found difficult was cigarettes. In the early days our social contacts were usually through a glass of beer in one of the pubs at Bunbury.

There was no library in town and I began to buy books to read. Reading alienated me from the workers around us, who did not believe in reading much.

My other pastime was dancing. I found that dances were held at Roelands as well as in Bunbury. I found the behavior of Australians most peculiar. The girls were sitting on benches around the dance floor or at the tables if such were provided, while men were standing as a group at the door, occasionally sneaking out for a drink and even more occasionally asking the girls to dance after the music started playing. This meant that I was probably the most frequent dancer on the floor. I received some peculiar looks though, when I would sit down to talk to a girl I just danced with. I felt somewhat conspicuous and soon would begin to bring some Polish friends with me so that other boys could get the same peculiar looks I received.

I got to know the inhabitants of Roelands fairly well. Still, I never got involved in any love affairs or otherwise. Our behavior gave us a certain air of notoriety. I found this tag rather difficult to bear at one time or another. An engineer in charge of the public works in the area tended to use me as interpreter. This was facilitated by the fact that we Polish workers had gotten a good name, and the Public Works Department was asking for more and more Poles to work in the area (one could say that we were “Poles apart” from the other immigrant workers – OK, so this is a poor joke…), hence the demand for my services as an interpreter.

I got to know the engineer’s family and visited them in their home. The day arrived when the engineer had a heart problem and was hospitalized. I visited him in the hospital and escorted his wife home. I did not worry much when I was invited for the ubiquitous cup of tea, nor when she flashed her pink panties when sitting down directly in front of me. However, when she started talking about enjoying walking “au naturel” at home I decided it was time to go home. There was the matter of a certain disparity in our ages and the preservation of my idealized sense of feminine beauty. I noticed however that a friend of ours began frequenting the house and talking about nudists and such. Well, the difference between Germany in 1948 and a somewhat strict Australia must have been too much for him.

Stefan was the real Don Juan in the village. During the ten months I spent in Roelands, Stefan was engaged twice (and once afterwards). In the village the girls reminded me of the Victorian era, while they behaved somewhat differently when they would come to the camp uphill. Stefan’s “fiancées” would spent whole day with him in his tent. They left before dark. I guess spending the night would be too bold. Well, I should not judge, I really do not know what they were doing in his tent all day. I know that I would either read or play cards in the tent, otherwise we stayed outside.

One day I found an advertisement for a British-Polish correspondence club, and joined it. Soon I was writing letters to many damsels all over the world. In particular I was writing to Yvonne, who was later to become my wife. I was also writing to a number of Polish girls in Poland. These letters made me finally realize that I should have been helping my father. The girls were asking for help; my father never did. I began to investigate the possibility of bringing my father over to Australia and found that there would be no difficulty pursuing this from the Australian side anyway.

A new group of Polish immigrants arrived and the foreman asked me to work with them. My job as the winch operator was now completed and the new workers needed to be incorporated into the mixture of Australian miners and us, the veteran immigrants. The work was the pick-and-shovel kind, and as the new guys had some difficulty working with the pick I decided to work mostly with the pick, while the others shoveled the loosened dirt. Picking, however, was somewhat strenuous and I would occasionally rest, supporting myself on the pick. The foreman observed my behavior and came to complain.

“I see you believe that you do not have to work here!” he said as he approached.

“Not at all. I am trying to keep the others supplied with the loose dirt,” I answered.

“Do you think I am an idiot? You do f… all work, stand on your f… shovel and enjoy the f… view!”

“Well, I did rest momentarily, but I…”

“Don’t argue with me get back to work, you b…!”

“There is no call to get mad or swear at me.”

“Look, this is it. Get back to work or I will smash your b… face!”

“Go right ahead,” I said. He walked away muttering.

That evening I complained to the union rep, and the next day I went to the engineer in charge.

I must say that after reflection I had to agree that I provoked the man and that I was not working as well as most of my friends. Still, at that point I would not admit any such thing. I was angry that he swore at me with very limited provocation. The explanation given to me that it was the common Australian language was of no avail, as I was not prepared to accept this language when directed to me. I claimed also that the threat of violence was equivalent to violence itself and said that it was impossible for me to work under the man. I was asked what it was that I wanted to be done. I said that I just wanted a different job. Of course originally I was thinking about asking for an apology, but as the time went along I began to feel guilty about the whole thing and sort of felt stupid.

We came to an agreement. I was given a choice of jobs and selected irrigation work in Harvey. The workers for the Public Works had a tent camp near Harvey. Here the tents were raised higher and as in Roelands, they were supported by a wooden framework. Below the actual tent, a loose material was attached to the frame, thus completing the structure. The tents in Harvey were sitting in an open field; thus they were much hotter during the day and much more dusty or moist depending on the weather. In fact one had to clean the tent thoroughly every day; otherwise all one’s belongings would be covered with dust or moisture. I was shamed one day when the police came looking for some individual who had escaped from prison and searched my tent while I was still in bed on a Sunday morning. They found dust covering everything in the tent.

Opposite my tent lived a Serbian stonemason who would get up at five every morning, and clean up his tent, wash all his and his son’s clothes and straighten out the area around his tent. The comparison with my tent made the policeman exclaim, “Don’t you clean your place like other people?”

At the entry to the camp lived the most senior inhabitant: an old Australian, must have been at least sixty. The man worked for one thing only: to have his case [56] of beer on Saturday. He was dead to the world on Sunday. Before he started drinking, however, he would thoroughly clean his place and put on his best clothes. Most of my other neighbors were away each holiday – some gone to Harvey, many all the way to Perth.

56. Australian case of beer contains five dozen or sixty bottles of beer.

I did various jobs during my stay in that camp. Originally I worked digging ditches. The old Australian fellow was the most impressive digger (no pun intended). He appeared to dig very, very slowly, but it was difficult to keep up with him. He would never break his rhythm, digging all day and coming out with perfectly measured depth and angle of the walls. Now he demonstrated the kind of work that the foreman at Roelands would have wanted me to do. When digging, I attempted to do my damnedest to keep up with the old fellow – I don’t think I ever quite made it.

Later on I helped with construction of the cement walls along the dug-up trenches. Although I became quite good in pouring the walls and evening out the fresh concrete, I could not aspire to become a “finisher” – a worker who would smooth out the concrete surface to a lustrous finish in order to prevent water erosion during normal use.

Finally my friend, the Serb, trained me as a stonemason assistant. I spent most of the time in Harvey at this last job. I did not, however, realize how serious these tradesmen were, always competing with one another. One day my Serbian friend was sick and I got assigned to work with an Italian stonemason. While working I began to joke and laugh. The Italian told me not to laugh at him and when I took his advice lightly, he grabbed a long-handled shovel and started whacking me across my back. I asked him to stop twice, but this infuriated him even more. At the third hit I reached for the shovel and twisted it out of his hands, thus breaking his fingers. Luckily we were observed by a foreman, who took my side in the proceedings, otherwise I might have been accused of planning to injure the fellow.

I apologized to the Italian for doing him injury. I felt very sorry for him, all the more so as he had a small farm in the area and his injury made it difficult for him to tend it.

The worst job out of the ones I had at Harvey was helping a truck driver. Whereas he was working on piece-work, I was paid by the hour. Still, he expected me to work filling the truck with gravel or other deliveries at the speed he was doing it. Furthermore, he still had difficulty obtaining an adequate amount of gasoline (wartime rationing was still in effect, despite the fact that it was four years after the war) and used a mixture of gas and kerosene. Not only were the engine fumes potent, but he would expect us to make up the lost time whenever his engine refused to work.

I continued now to make efforts to bring my father over. After getting my forms and documents and applying to various authorities, I got a letter from Aunt Jadwiga. My father had died.

I still regret today that I didn’t start sending insulin to my father from Germany – I could have asked the doctors at the military hospital to give me some. I did send him some from Australia, but by that time his health had already deteriorated too far – he died from a general breakdown of his system caused by his inflammation of the pancreas. And I regret that I did not try to get him out of Poland sooner. My excuse was the difficulty of getting people out. But stupid as I am, I was able to get out. There is no end of regretting. The fact is that the way I felt was more important to me than the well-being of my father.

I was depressed. It took me a few months before I could write to Aunt Jadwiga. In the meantime the Australian government announced that they would shorten our compulsory two years of work at the location specified by the government to 18 months, and my 18 months had run out. I looked now for the most lucrative employment. A mining concern (Anglo-American Mining Co) was advertising for workers to be trained as miners. I applied as a diamond-drill trainee.

It took one day by train to go to Perth. Then it took three days by train to Big Bell [57]. Saving on my money, I travelled by coach – which meant sleeping in a sitting position on a hard bench. Most of the travelling companions were “no-hopers” from the outback. Most of them had drunk and dissipated until their money ran out. Now they were traveling north to replenish resources. Some had no money to buy food, others had enough left to spend the time gambling away what was left. One of those asked me for a loan of five pounds (20 dollars at the time). I told him that I was not stupid enough to lend him the money, but might be persuaded to give him a pound. He accepted without gratitude. They were not a bad crowd, just very basic in their needs: food, fuck and fun, or the three f’s in short.

I was not entitled to go to the restaurant car. We bought food when the train stopped: mostly tea, pies and pasties, beer, biscuits [58]. I had to share what I bought, since so many of my new acquaintances had no money.

Somehow three days had gone, and here was the station.

57. Apparently the mine at Big Bell is still in operation. Big Bell is situated 200 miles southwest from Wiluna – the last town before the desert stretching towards the Northern Territories. To the north (some 500 miles) lies Marble Bar – called the hottest place on earth or popularly called “hundred degrees for hundred days,” the length of the hottest season in Marble Bar.

58. Australian biscuits are called cookies in US.

We were greeted by a local constable, who examined thoroughly all the newcomers. He picked on two men and told them that he did not want them there and suggested that they leave. Alternately he was going to put them in jail for vagrancy and then send them back. One of the men started an argument and ended up in jail, the other accepted the verdict and left on the train in which we had arrived.

The action of the constable amazed me at that time. Later it became very clear. He was “the law” in a territory comprising some ten thousand square miles and with a small but potentially violent population. The way he kept peace was that he kept ahead of the law-breakers. I have seen the constable break up a fight by picking up two men, one under each arm and throwing them in jail. He would also line up the witnesses before the court time and arrange to have the verdict go his way practically every time. I served once as his witness in court and he was watching me leave after my dismissal at the end of my stay.

I found out that I had to go to the mine by taxi. There was only one taxi and it was the only way one could go to the mine, unless somebody came to pick one up. The train came only once a week and the train was the main reason for the taxi to earn its keep. The price was arranged accordingly. The taxi took five men, each paying 20 pounds (80 dollars) for the trip. The taxi driver was very helpful: he could wait for the payment, providing that one had a job waiting at the mine (everybody had a job waiting at the mine!). Similar robbery took place at the store (there was of course only one general store!). Everything cost three times as much as in Perth. But then one must understand that the number of buyers was limited, the town was supported by the mine and existed for the mine only.

It was an interesting road. Most of the roads in central Australia are “corrugated.” That means that the car continually jumps like a pogo stick. The way such an erosion of the road starts is that a bump (possibly caused by a rock or water erosion) causes the car to jump up and drop down a foot or so away. This drop causes a hole in the road, especially after a storm downpour. Such a downpour occurs rarely but happens almost cataclysmically. Now the next car jumps up, down on the next hole and up coming out of the hole – thus creating the next hole. Pretty soon one has a typical corrugated road, which in the very dry climate hardens to the consistency of rock. The ride over a corrugated road (some 25 miles) was more exhausting than the three-day ride on the train.

The mine provided the quarters: an 8 x 8 feet hut with an iron bed and a mattress. One had to go to town immediately to buy the blankets and whatever else. There was a common washroom and the dining room, where the food was very reasonable (subsidized by the mine). The feature of the dining room was the waitresses, most of whom apparently had worked the red-lamp district of Fremantle [59] prior to coming to Big Bell.

59. Generally, prostitutes were to be found close to the ports in Australia. Main cities were clean, law abiding (!) and full of churches.

I had one day to rest after my trip and then I started work on night shift. I suppose the reason for the night shift work was to give one a peaceful beginning. Night shift was the slowest and generally the smallest shift.

The first job was diamond drilling for exploration, which was also much slower than ring drilling and required a degree of precision. I was taught to “feel” the drill in such a way that I knew what rock it was going through or if it was going through a rock at all [60]. I got used to working under a shower of oil originating from the drilling machine. This machine was powered by air, but the cylinders had to move on a layer of lubricating oil. The oil, however, was continually blown out by the exhaust draft of the air that powered the machine.

60. Occasionally the drill would strike an empty space (a crack in the rock). One cannot let the drill operate in the empty space as the diamond bit would became loose and fall off.

For a while I assisted the man who was drilling to obtain a core sample. In this way I learned to operate the machine, change drills, and define the speed at which the drilling should proceed. At least I attempted to learn all those things.

When I was able to operate the machine by myself, I started working on piecework. The company paid one shilling [61] per foot drilled. At a very good shift one could drill up to 100 feet (I believe the record was 160). If things went very badly one could drill less than 30 feet. If I remember right my average was about 65 feet. If one did not feel the machine right and kept running the drill in a crack, one could lose the diamond bit. The bit was worth 150 pounds and if the bit was lost it could damage the mill thus causing very expensive problems to the company. In general, for the worker, a lost bit could mean a dismissal.

Big Bell was a mine with a very wide vein of poor-quality telluride of gold. For every ton of rock processed an average of two pennyweights of gold were extracted after a very expensive processing. For the mine to pay, thousands of tons of rock had to be processed each day. The way the rock was mined was through a method called ring drilling. This method requires a shaft to be sunk from one level of the mine down to the lower level (in Big Bell a vertical distance of 200 feet). After the shaft was sunk, the rock was dropped down by drilling the holes around the shaft and dynamiting the rock down the chute of the lower level. The shaft was thus enlarged with each successive set of holes drilled until most of the rock between the two levels was gone.

61. In the old Australian monetary system there were 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. An Australian pound was worth about 4 dollars at the time I was working for Anglo-American mining. Thus a shilling was worth about 20 cents. Today the Australian currency is expressed in dollars and cents.

An old level was rather frightening to work on since one stood at the edge of a dark abyss and had to work fast during the drilling, often pulling hundreds of feet of drills in order to change the bit or clean the hole. The safety rules demanded that one was to have a rope attached to a belt at one’s waist and tied into a hook securely placed in the rock wall. This was not always observed, as the rope would interfere with speedy movements. The rock was covered with oil which made for frequent slips on treacherous slopes leading to the 200 ft abyss.

The job that I hated the most, however, was drilling in a riser. Once most of the rock was extracted between the mine levels, a shelf remained at a lower level. The shelf facilitated the sliding of the rock dynamited from the upper level to the chute on the lower level. This shelf was composed of part of the ore vein; thus the drilling now proceeded upwards from the lower level. In order that the drill bit remain cool, water was poured under pressure through the core of the drill and out of the diamond bit. If one was drilling upwards, all this water was flowing freely down one’s neck throughout the eight-hour shift. It was hard to bring oneself to go down the mine to withstand the eight-hour downpour. One would often have a few drinks prior to the shift in order to “kill the pain.”

There was very little to do in that place. One could go to town, eh? The town had two parallel streets half to three quarters of a mile long with four or five short streets permitting movement between the two main streets. Besides the few houses where the married miners lived, there was a pub, a general store, a jail and the courthouse/police station. We often went to the first two and avoided the others.

The place was hot and dry. For all my ten months in Big Bell, I remember two willy-willys [62] but I don’t remember a rainy day. When one went to town it was real pleasure to go into the pub and out of 100+ degrees dry heat. The trouble was that after a couple of beers, one could not walk out of the pub. It was really amusing to watch people go to the door and immediately turn back to have another beer. Many miners would spend their four days alternating between the pub and the jail. The constable would throw anybody drunk, disorderly or fighting for a cooling off day in jail.

62. Australian tornado is called a willy-willy.

One way of avoiding drinking in town was to wander around the countryside instead. Unfortunately there was little to see. The countryside was not officially called desert, but it was a dry area of rock outcrops with the sparsest amount of scraggly vegetation. Even the gums would not grow in that area. Kangaroos and wallabies were as rare as people. If we met one, it was liable to watch us with the same dose of curiosity that we watched it. The days were still and starkly bright, and the nights were clear and with the huge firmament full of stars, no clouds to be seen anywhere.

I bought a powerful radio receiver – luckily the mine supplied the electrical power. For some reason one could easily listen to all the stations to the east, including London and the Vatican, but especially Moscow and the Arab stations. Arab music was weird, while I often enjoyed music from India and Pakistan. To the west one could listen to the Philippines and Hong Kong but not the US. Those stations that we found were very clear with hardly any fading.

I had no close friends in Big Bell. I liked many people. The most experienced miners divided into (gold) “diggers” [63] and the old immigrants. Most of the old guys would be a very friendly bunch. The other group consisted of the newcomers to Australia, mostly English. These characters varied a lot, some very likable, others positively hateful – some very dangerous. I wrote letters to my friends. As a matter of fact this was one of my favorite pastimes.

63. Australians, especially soldiers, are often called diggers.

I liked to read, but my reading was limited by the availability of reading material. There was no library in Big Bell. The books one could find could not exactly be called examples of classical literature. One could get more porno books than good stories and more cheap romances than the staple classics.

Australians were inveterate gamblers. On one of our holiday breaks – we worked ten days and rested four, while we changed our shift from day to afternoon to night – we discovered a large group of miners involved in a game of “two-up.” This a specifically Aussie game: the banker throws two coins up in the air. If the coins both fall heads up, the player wins; if the coins fall tails up, the banker wins. Most players double the bets each time. The banker may refuse a very high bet. If the banker throws a consecutive string of tails, he can win a very large sum of money. The first time I played, I won 70 pounds (almost 300 dollars) – this was enough to induce me to play for a while. In the long run I won nothing, as was to be expected from the laws of probability. Still it was an exciting pastime.

Later on I began to play poker. I was more familiar with this game and usually won limited amounts by proper selection of the people I played with and careful playing. As we often played four days straight, one had to observe two rules: not to drink too much and to play more cautiously as the time progressed. The day came when I did not observe these rules and not only lost most of the money won over months of playing but finished up drunk.

It all began when I did not select the people I played with carefully enough. A new player appeared who was a very friendly fellow. He suggested that each one of us buys a case of beer. Although I never expected that we would be able to drink all this beer, it turned out that we did.

Obviously when so much beer is drunk, one has to go to the toilet very often. Near the end of the fourth day, I had to go out. When I came back to my cabin, the new fellow was shuffling the cards. When the cards were dealt, we all bid. Nobody abstained. As the cards were drawn I had four tens. In the furious bidding that followed, the bank grew to eight hundred dollars. It turned out that three people had four of a kind and one had a full house. The new fellow had four Kings. I decided to never be so careless in the future, but it was not possible to prove that the cards were stacked, since we did not watch the deal carefully enough. Also the time was drawing close to the beginning of the shift.

I was drilling on the 400 level, which I hated because it was almost exhausted. For one, there were very few people working there, and for the other, the ground was broken up, making for very slow and careful drilling. The huge hole – the “abyss” – was pulling me in (I always had a bit of space sickness!), my head hurt and I could not see very well. Ever so often I had to empty myself. At the mid-shift break, I asked the foreman to let me go up and stay up. After looking over the state of my drilling site and discovering no safety problems, he agreed to let me go.

As usual I was soaked in oil. After dropping all my clothes and pulling them up to the ceiling to dry [64], I went to have a warm shower. It was heaven to lean against the shower stall and let the water flow, while I closed my eyes for a second. Half an hour later I was woken up by the foreman and told to stop the flow of warm water. In the evening I got a “pink slip.” [65]

64. In the dressing room there existed a multitude of rope pulleys connected to the blocks, with little wheels attached to the ceiling of the structure. One could hang his clothes on a hanger and attach the hanger to the rope. The rope could be moved through the pulley, thus pulling the wet clothes to the top of the structure. Warm air rising to the top of the building ensured quick drying of the clothes hanging at the ceiling.

65. I was fired for being drunk in the mine – one of the laws observed by the management and agreed to by the union. Everybody agreed that a drunk miner was a safety hazard.