A fourth yarn - about me, not sailing

I wrote this for a friend in Africa - a young man I proudly consider an honorary brother - and his siblings, and have decided to post it here. One day I may write an autobiography, and all I'll have to do is collate all these "yarns" and stitch them together into something sensible. My (2nd - I have another who I am trying to get an antenna he bought to) young brother could relate to these stories: where he is living now has open drains and problems with floods. The sister I mention in this story is my adoptive sister: I also have a birth sister. 

When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, I lived in a town called Mackay (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackay,_Queensland), in the state of Queensland. Mackay is a fairly flat town - it has ONE small hill in the town, we used to call "the hill" (it's real name was - and this is surprising, given how small it was - Mount Bassett). The ocean there had a very large tide range - from high tide to low would vary from four to seven metres. Unfortunately, that meant our stormwater drainage for the town sometimes would only work when the tide was out. It didn't rain often, though - only in part of summer (December-January), but for those months everything was wet.

I was with my adoptive family then, and my sister, Ann, and I often had to walk through shallow flood waters to get to school. People shouldn't normally walk through flood waters because they can hide areas where the soil has been washed away, but the flood water we were walking through was still, not flowing, so we knew the soil was OK. Ann hated that because she could feel tadpoles wriggling from time to time :) (Our backyard stayed so wet one year that we had ducks fly in for a couple of days.)

We carried a towel with us, and when we got to school, we would dry our feet and put our shoes on. The school insisted we wear shoes, but we hated that - even when there were no floodwaters, we would carry our shoes with us and only put them on when we were at school.

Our feet grew fairly tough, and we used to show off in front of the tourists by walking slowly across the hot bitumen on the roads in summer. My feet are a lot softer now, but I still prefer to go barefoot when we can. In fact, we had a local politician, Fiona Richardson (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Richardson and https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/08/in-memorium-and-exhortation-to-engage.html), who I used to write to about many things before she passed away: I heard her say in an interview that when she was growing up in Tanzania, she used to go barefoot and still preferred that, and mentioned that I also preferred being barefoot. When she replied to that email, she crossed out "Dear Kayleen", and wrote "Dear fellow barefoot advocate" :)

Going back to Queensland, we rented a house in the style called a "Queenslander": it had the house up high, so floodwater could pass through underneath - and that gave us a cooler place in the summer. (A lot of people these days in Queensland have air conditioning, but we didn't, and my adoptive parents never liked air conditioning - we used fans and a few other tricks like wet cloths around the neck instead.) We would listen to the forecast, and depending on how much rain was forecast, we would put anything that needed to be kept dry up on blocks to keep it above the floodwater.

At that time, the streets in Mackay didn't have pipes to drain stormwater: they had open drains, about 1.5 to 2 m deep on either side of the road. When the tide was in, the stormwater would sit in those drains until the tide went out, and then it would drain into the ocean. If there was enough floodwater to cover the road so the drains weren't visible (another reason no-one should walk through floodwater - there might be holes you don't know about), us local people knew not to park close the edge of the road, but we would find occasional tourists who didn't, and would do what we called "a southern park" where their car would go part way into the drain. Next morning, we would see the car sitting sideways, half into the drain (no-one was ever hurt by this: they were moving slowly, and the cars didn't go far, but they did tip right over). After I left Mackay, the local Council replaced the open drains with buried pipes.

When I went to University, it was 1,000 km away, in Brisbane, at University of Queensland (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Queensland). I have quite a few stories from there, but I'll just tell you of my friend from Finland. His name was Marti Kankunnen - but there is a particular way of pronouncing that, with what are called rolled r's, and not many Australians could handle that in those days, so he used to introduce himself by saying "Gidday, my name is Marti K, but you can call me Bill". :) (While at Uni, he went back to Finland, and his girlfriend says he complained all the time about the cold, but she - despite having only lived in northern Australia - wasn't affected by the cold.)

When I finished Uni, I started work at a company in Mackay, but most of the projects we were working on were inland from Mackay, at towns like Moranbah (http://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/moranbah-qld). These days, we only send one or a few people to a site, and transmit everything over the Internet, but there was no Internet in those days - in fact, I can remember the excitement at our company when we got our first electric typewriter, so we went to site a lot more. That meant a lot more driving - up to 1,000 km in a day, which I wouldn't be able to do these days. When I started, I was told "You'll need a car: make sure it's a good one". (I bought a small car, but the company would pay me for using it, which is how I was able to afford that.)

We would drive inland from Mackay, and after about 20 km we went up a steep hill range until we got onto a plateau. It was only a few hundred metres higher, but cars in those days didn't have computers, and my car used to run very badly on the plateau until a friendly mechanic showed me how to make a small change to fuel-air mixture, and it would run properly. So I would drive to the top of the plateau, pull over to the side of the road, hop out with a small screwdriver, make a change, then get back in and keep driving :)

There were a lot of accidents, incidentally, because people were careless about driving then. I won't tell you about those, but there was one funny story about a boss of mine who hit a big pothole, and found he could only drive in reverse - he had to drive backwards for 30 kilometres to get help :)

The country we were driving through was flat, what we call "scrubby". I lost all of my photos from that time when I was living on my small boat in the 1990s, because they got damp. We didn't have digital cameras back then. The nearest I can find to give you an idea of what it was like is at https://www.outbackqueensland.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Cunnamulla_DJI_0703-rsz1048x699.jpg. The main difference is that where I was the ground was more red with a very fine dust called bulldust - which is also a slang for lies (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldust). I worked in Queensland for 3 years, and then kept that car for another 13 years, and even after the 13 years I was still finding that fine red dust in places in the car - which is not bulldust :)

It was very hot, but I liked that country. In 2012, the company I work for sent me to Mongolia, where I worked for a few weeks in the Gobi Desert (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert). Except that it didn't have trees (or many roads), the country in the Gobi Desert reminded me of Queensland. We had digital cameras then, of course, so I've attached a couple of photos. You'll see camels in those photos: Australia also has wild camels - they were brought here, along with herders from India (wrongly referred to as being from Afghanistan), in the 1800s and have thrived - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_feral_camel.

A couple of the things I particularly remember from that trip is that one of the local dishes was almost exactly the same as one my adoptive mother used to make, and the people I was working with showed me a small plant with white flowers that they could use for salt - it had a garlic taste, apparently.

I made friends with our receptionist in our office in Ulaanbaatar (I worked there for a few days to finish my report), and we used to email each other until she left the company a couple of years ago. When I went there, I had just missed their festival called "Naadam" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naadam), which involves wrestling, horse riding, and archery, which she loved going to.

Unfortunately, Ulaanbaatar (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulaanbaatar) has a couple of problems, and one of those is flooding in spring, when all the ice melts. In Mackay, floods in 1912 were so bad they changed the course of the Pioneer River that the town is built on (a friend of ours died driving into floodwater about ten years ago, which is why I am always careful about that), and Ulaanbaatar's floods are a major problem every year. I tried to get some people interested in doing some work on that and their winter air pollution problem, but without any success - fortunately, others are working on fixing that problem.

Another thing I remember from Ulaanbaatar is helping a young mother with a pram go down some steps - which is exactly the same as I would do in Australia. I've always found people are basically the same wherever I have travelled, and most people are good.

And on that note, young brother, I will go and get ready for this day.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2020 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)