Dave wants to buy my house, so I went over this afternoon to talk with him about a price. I arrive to discover that my back yard has been declared a crime scene (with tape and everything) and there's a dead body lying against my back fence in the laneway, the area is full of homicide & forensic teams, and it's on the national news.
An aboriginal couple from Wiluna, who were staying illegally at the pensioner's flats, were fighting outside the hardware store at the other end of the laneway (about 300m from my place) around midnight last night; the husband killed the woman (don't know how), then dragged her body down the laneway; he got sprung at the north corner of my backyard. The poor woman's body had to remain there (under a protective tent) until the forensics & homicide teams could come up from the city, and our police had to tape off the entire laneway right across town, plus my backyard (in case a weapon or any other evidence was thrown over the fence).
The sad thing is that this is "normal" in the aboriginal community out here - family members are constantly feuding, fighting and stabbing each other; the women are as notorious for it as the men. Domestic violence between men and women, mothers and daughters, and siblings, is rife and vicious.
I would walk down that laneway any time of day or night and feel perfectly safe - I don't feel at all anxious here, but if I was an aboriginal woman I'd be in fear for my life every moment of the day, because the family relationships are appalling. Mix it with the drug and alcohol problems and you get bodies in the street. Just terrible.
Jesus god! And here I am hoping to cash in on my property value! "Yes, the place has been rewired, replumbed, new kitchen and of course there's the complementary dead body just over there, how much would you like to offer?" Not to sound cold-bloodedly capitalistic or anything, but could you possibly think of a worse situation for negotiating a house sale?
To add to the bizarre situation, Dave also has 3 young Korean backpackers living in one room of the house. This is a whole other crazy story. We got a fire and rescue call to a rollover on the Wiluna Road, but it turned out to be these 3 young Korean guys who were, amazingly, unharmed (van was a writeoff).They can barely speak English, and the ambulance officers finally worked out that their GPS had sent them waaaaay the wrong way (they were trying to get to Karratha to look for work).
So there they are, stranded in the middle of what must look like another planet in some kind of hellish alternative universe, and suddenly all sorts of townspeople are arriving to collect them, their bags, put their van on a towtruck and whisk them all back to town. That afternoon, Dave and Darcy have got one of them working at the BP station, another working at the supermarket and the third one doing chores at my house, and now they're stacked like sardines in the spare room (possibly for safety), with a dead body and homicide squad in the backyard, a crazy lady in a red bus with a cow skull chattering away at them in a foreign language in the driveway, and no idea how they're going to get back to Korea.
They were extremely interested in the bus, possibly as a getaway vehicle, but as we were checking it out Dave came bustling out of the house. "Righto, everyone in the ute!" He jammed them in and waved. "I'm taking them to State Emergency Services training! We're going to Mount Magnet to do a body search for a lost prospector tomorrow morning!" So these poor young Korean blokes are having the most bizarre working holiday experience you can imagine.
But despite all the insanity, Dave offered me a great price on the house. I just hope the body retrieval team are finished before the valuer turns up.
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