Ye Olde Liffestylle

Most of you would find the conditions here at Peak Hill very basic & rough; the house is ancient, full of mice, insects, cracks, floorboards giving way, no air con, tank water which has to be accessed via the outdoor kitchen & homemade tap. To flush the toilet, you have to fill the cistern first via a lever & spring wire thing made from scrapyard metal. You share the shower with frogs and giant grasshoppers. Mice have eaten through into the fridges.

At night, take your pick from the old iron bedframes stacked up along the outside porch wall, and lie there listening to the generator running 24/7 (don't forget to put more diesel in it each morning). There's no toaster or microwave - you need the genny power for the fridges, lights, air con & water pump. If anything goes wrong, the repair person is You. There's no point screaming when a great big locust leaps into your hair, because there'll be another 27 of them coming along shortly. Cover yourself with Bushman extreme insect repellent or the flies will fill your eyes and the mosquitos will eat you alive - you should see Gary's feet, he looks like he has smallpox from all the bites.

But it's charming and picturesque, and we have what we need, including the sat phone if we need to call the flying doctor (although if we got bitten by a snake or accidentally severed a femoral artery, the first aid options would be 1. a bush knife or 2. a gun).

So as I ramble around the old stone ruins of the original town, I start to wonder how mind-bogglingly hard it must have been back then. Most of the building stones would take a very big strong person to lift, and I reckon I could manage to stack 3 before I had to lie down in the dirt moaning for water & a chiropractor. They had to dig wells, then build structures over them, make roads, dig mine shafts, build houses & sheds & drinking troughs, ovens, telegraph poles, tools and equipment, all without power tools or engines. Then, if some poor bugger died from the backbreaking labour in the heat, it just made more work because then someone had to go and somehow chisel a grave out of the iron-hard rock. I would have said "Christ I can't be arsed digging up more goddam rocks, just chuck him on the rubbish heap out the back for the lizards."

Imagine getting sick, or breaking a leg. Imagine being a horse! Or a woman! It reminds me of the time my high school friend Sharon got a job at a historic village "living museum", recreating pioneer days for tourists. They didn't count on accidentally hiring a feminist comedienne, so Sharon's performance included things like "Oh hello, I'll just pop out to the field to give screaming drug-free birth to my eighth child and if I don't haemorrage too much I'll whip up some tasty maggot-ridden dried beef biscuits which will shatter any teeth we have left."

There was no Panadol, no Bushman Tropical Insect Repellent - just grog, rocks, grog, scary toxic olde tinnedde foodde, more rocks and grog, and a gun when you couldn't take it anymore (after you'd dug up enough fifty pound rocks to build an oven and cooked down some spare horseshoes to make the shell casing & then waited six months for the gunpowder supplies to arrive that is).