No Place Like Home

The Age

Saturday April 14, 2007

Mark Dapin

Want to double your income overnight? Then head for Karratha, and the big bucks from WA's mining boom. The trick, though, is to find somewhere to stay, as Mark Dapin discovers.

At the check-in desk of the karratha international Hotel, where a functional suite with minimal furnishings costs $200 a night, a young tradesman asks for long-term rates. "How long are you thinking of staying?" asks the receptionist. "About a year," he says.

Karratha, Western Australia, a mining town in the Pilbara, is full. One major hotel is booked out for all of 2007. The caravan sites have waiting lists 150 names long. A family home, here in the desert, can rent for $4000 a month. The local ABC Radio news reported one man paying more than $200 a week to sleep in his swag in a caravan park. A businessman has imported air-conditioned shipping containers from China, and plans to put them in a car park and fill them with workers. People are sleeping on the beaches and in tents, and hundreds live in sheds, garages and buses in the light industrial area.

There are jobs bursting out of the earth. Anybody can come here and reinvent themselves as a trades assistant, and earn up to $100,000 a year for an endless working week in the baking air of an overheated boom town.

A previous manager of Pilbara Joblink had at least one job-seeker come and stay at her home. A subcontractor has his workers living with him. They are supposed to be building houses, but there are no houses for them to live in while they work.

I share the plane from Perth with Shane from Woodside, Mark from Pilbara Iron and Barb from Enzed. I am one of the few people aboard who does not have a name tag on their shirt or the logo of their company on their overalls.

It is the day of a protest meeting against the Government's WorkChoices legislation, held at Trawlers Tavern, a sprawling pub, restaurant and function centre, where the mostly male audience looks as if it has taken a wrong turn on the way to a tattoo show, or a goatee-growing competition. Suntanned arms bear regimental tattoos, Royal Australian Navy tattoos and spidery tribal patterns. One man has two tears falling forever from his right eye, one for each year he has spent in prison. They are big men, with bodies built by work, rather than weights. It is going on for midday, and most have already started drinking. The speaker who earns their biggest cheer is the one who promises to come back later and put some union money behind the bar.

Karratha (population 7000) was built at the end of the 1960s as a company town for Pilbara Iron, to house overspill accommodation for the nearby port of Dampier. Today it is crowded with workers from Hamersley Iron, the Dampier Salt Company, Robe River Iron Associates and the North-West Shelf gas project. The border between Karratha and Dampier barely exists.

It is a modern, modular town surrounded by raw, prehistoric country, where the earth peels back to reveal plains of salt, and rock rich in iron ore stands sentinel over deep, open-cut mines. The resources boom has made Western Australia the driving force behind the Australian economy, and the Pilbara the motor for WA. There is work for everyone in the big mining companies and the hundreds of smaller businesses needed to service them. Locals, who can get jobs in the mines and continue to live at home, tend not to be interested in shop work, and shops are sometimes closed because the owners cannot get anybody behind the counter.

The Centro Karratha is the largest shopping centre in the Pilbara, and probably has more job vacancies than any mall of any size in Australia. Woolworths alone is hoping to recruit a meat packer, night fill staff, produce assistants, a deli assistant, a liquor assistant, supervisors, service cashiers and ... a store recruitment officer. Meanwhile the Immigration Department has permitted Karratha McDonald's to hire eight "managers" from the Philippines on temporary visas to make hamburgers.

Yet there are empty houses in Bulgarra, the old part of town, and even the caravan parks are sometimes only half-full. The houses are owned by Pilbara Iron or its former workers and, for impenetrable reasons, have been allowed to fall into disrepair. The parks accept only long-term leases outside the tourist season, and can take only a set number of residents.

Accountant Gary Slee came up with the idea of accommodating people in shipping containers.

I ask him how long he has lived in Karratha.

"We came here at 3pm on December 1, 1978," he says.

No surprise he is an accountant.

"There are two classes of workers up here," says Slee, "ones who work for the major resource companies, and they've already got accommodation provided, air fares, good working conditions, the whole works; and there's the other class, the smaller end of the market, where you've got to scramble for your own accommodation, and the benefits are nonexistent. Everything is changing so fast, and the smaller end of the market has got to meet the big end in terms of conditions, otherwise it won't survive."

Slee sees six-metre sea containers as one answer to the accommodation crisis. He has ordered 56 of them from China as the first stage of his project. The standard container is fully furnished, with a bathroom, kitchen, microwave oven, fridge, stove, two shuttered windows and an air-conditioning unit. The luxury model has designer furnishings and a plasma-screen TV with DVD.

Do workers in China actually live in these?

"I've got no idea," says Slee.

Critics suggest the new housing estate is going to resemble an inland dockyard, but Slee says he will landscape the car park and add shades, patios and deckings: "It'll look like a village, actually."

With containers in it.

"Yeah, the structures will look like containers," he concedes. "It's artistic. It's a different way of looking at things. We'll possibly try and have different colours, too. So you could have a pale pink one or a pale blue one." Does he think many of the blokes will choose the pale pink option?

"Probably not," he concedes. "I've heard stories, though."

People have already asked to live in the display units. Slee hopes to sell them on a 4 1/2-year lease for $60,000 to $65,000 outright ($95,000 for a two-bedroom container), then charge site fees of $200 per week, "like a caravan park".

"At the moment, you'd probably get $500 to $600 a week for one of these," says Slee.

When the lease is up, the owners can simply move their container elsewhere.

"That's the beauty of it," says Slee. "The global transportation system is based on sea containers. You can take it where you want." Slee's accountancy business handles a large share of the town's tax returns, so he knows exactly how much money people are earning.

"We're doing one at the moment," he says, "for a site supervisor who is on $250,000 a year." He has seen coater-welders make $3000 to $4000 a week.

At the service station outside the overwhelmingly Aboriginal community of Roebourne, 40 scorching kilometres from Karratha, a chalk-board bears an unchanging message. "Long-range weather forecast is 'hot, hot and damned hot'. Last rain: nothing. Last snow: the ice age."

The streets are silent at midday, with only a few women talking on the veranda of the general store. Apart from its forbidding, shuttered hotel, Roebourne looks like a model community, scrupulously tidy and barely inhabited. It was the death here of John Pat in 1983 that eventually led to the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, but for the moment life seems calm.

Tyson Mowarin, a cameraman/editor at the Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation, a media production and training company part-funded by resources money, says, "Some [indigenous] people have been left behind, but there are some who are learning to take advantage of it and become a part of it. Like us, for instance. This corporation's getting a bit of work out of it, making corporate DVDs and stuff. There's a lot of money coming into Karratha, but not much staying here.

It's all taken away by fly-in, fly-out workers."

Mowarin knows of only two Roebourne people working full-time on the North-West Shelf.

"Not everyone wants to work in that type of industry," he says. "They create all these traineeship opportunities and say, 'We need five per cent indigenous people on this crew', but not everyone wants to be a construction worker or a miner."

Mowarin got a job on one of the big projects in 2003. "I done labouring," he says, "and I ended up being a scaffolder. When we first started, they made us indigenous fellas jump through a lot of hoops. The constitution for the work site said you'd be on a three-month trial, and if you messed up you'd be gone, but no matter what your trade was, or what your level, as soon as you walked through that security gate you'd get the award wage - at least $1000 a week - but the blackfellas didn't get that.

"We were working side by side with the other people, I was using the jackhammer, I was using the shovel, the fella next to me was using the jackhammer and the shovel, but they put us indigenous people on a one- or two-month trial first, and we wasn't getting the award wage. We were getting about $500-$600. We were doing 54 hours a week, like the person next to us, the same amount of sweat, the same amount of hours, the same everything except the pay. And we had to do that for a month, and then we had to do that three-month trial. Only us fellas.

"I done a year there," Mowarin says. "My cousins done a year. Quite a lot of us crew were there for a year. The supervisors told us that when they had a meeting about getting the indigenous people out there, some of the big bosses didn't want us to be there.

"They said as soon as we'd get our pay we'd all be gone to get drunk and not come in to work. Every single one of those whitefellas drink. I've never had a drink in my life. They said that we were gonna be drunk, even though the manager of the company that we worked for, he lost his licence for drink-driving. And one of the bosses who said he didn't want us out there, he got the sack before us. We didn't get treated right."

The fly-in, fly-out mentality penetrates every industry in Karratha. The Port of Call is a small brothel and sex shop ("Most credit cards and EFTPOS available") with a regular rotation of fly-in, fly-out prostitutes.

The madam, "Deb", says, "I won't use local girls. All of my girls come here for a short period of time. They're focused, they're here to make money, they work, they go. Girls who live here make friends, want a social life, and all of a sudden it's, 'I'm sick. I've got a headache', because they want to go and party. So, from a business point of view, it's no good. I've tried a couple of times, and it's been a dismal failure."

She opened the sex shop as "a service to the community". When the Port of Call was just a brothel, she used to get people ringing up in the middle of the night to ask where they could buy vibrators or DVDs. The only options in the Pilbara were mail order or party plan, neither of which could satisfy a spur-of-the-moment craving for Debbie Does Dampier or a black vibrator.

Her noticeboard operates as a contact service for local gays, who are all but invisible in the Pilbara. "It's not like you can put an ad in the paper," she says. "You can't be overt about who you are, who you want to meet, and what you want to do. You're in a mining town. Are you really going to put your hand up in the air and say, 'Hey, I'm gay'? What's gonna happen? You're gonna get smacked out. You're just setting yourself up to be punched out every time you go to the pub."

Deb will not say how much money she is making.

"That's nothing to do with anybody. To me, that's rude."

But business is healthy?

"Yeah, but I'm the same as any small business. People think 'lots of money', but I've got high overheads. I don't own the house where the girls stay. I rent the house. So I'm stuck in that market too. My overheads are high. I'm not going to lay out on the table what they are."

As a consequence of the resource companies' decision to introduce on-site drug and alcohol testing for workers, more people are turning to harder drugs such as heroin and ice, which leave the system faster than, for example, cannabis.

The Pilbara drugs scene is "huge", says Deb, and other locals anonymously confirm this. Drive-in, drive-out dealers can do the return run from Perth in a weekend.

"Ice worries me," she says. "We've had a few clients in here on ice, and it's scary shit. Anything, and they snap like that. Mate, there is something about their eyes. They all of a sudden go cold and hard. And these are people you've known. Their face sets and you know they'd kick you, stab you, shoot you and have no memory of it."

Everything that happens in town is affected by the big resource companies. Business at the Port of Call was slow the night before I visited, after a couple of thousand tradespeople had turned out for the WorkChoices protest meeting.

"They would've been drinking at 10am," says Deb. "It was very quiet last night, because they were all passed out by 10pm."

Deb refers to long-time Karratha residents as "the forgotten people".

"The people missing out here are the locals, who have been here for years, renting," she says. "They don't have jobs with the big mining companies, they're not fly-in, fly-out, they're normal people with normal jobs, normal incomes, that cannot afford the high rentals but don't want to leave the town. So their choice is, move to a shed in the light industrial area. There are families out there in 40-degree heat with no air-conditioning. It's appalling. And the sea container village that they're thinking of is absolutely fabulous, because the big companies aren't going to touch them. That's what this town needs."

In the ramshackle light industrial areas that rim the town lie sprawled the headquarters of many of the smaller companies that service the mining giants. At Tarmon Holdings, a haulage and plant-hire company, 14 out of 15 workers live in buses or caravans, some of them parked in the driveways of friends' homes.

"There's only one bloke here - drives a semi - who's got a house in town," says Max Linthorne, a former timber worker from Manjimup, south of Perth. "He's got four of them. He's been here 30 years, and he's the one who doesn't mind the rent being $2000 a week. He'd go to $4000. He doesn't care how the other people moving into the town are going to live. We can't get across what we reckon is wrong: the real estate agents and them are keeping prices up just to make a killing."

Linthorne lives with his wife in the car park of Tarmon Holdings, in a converted bus they call Priscilla. Their closest neighbours in the car park are their daughter, a child-care worker, and son-in-law, a road-train driver. When Linthorne was retrenched from the timber industry in his late 40s, he set out to travel around Australia, taking jobs where he could. His idea was to be on the road for the rest of his working life. He began the journey four years ago.

"I said, 'I don't care if it takes 10 years or 15,'" says Linthorne. "It looks like it might take 15. Because I haven't got far yet." His daughter arrived in Karratha in her bus two years before him and "she didn't get any further than here either", says Linthorne.

At Karratha airport, waiting for the saturday morning flight back to Perth, most passengers are dressed for R&R in surf shirts, shorts and thongs.

While we kill time waiting to board, eyes turn to an advertising billboard for Skilled, a manpower services company. It is written in the form of a letter home from a fly-in, fly-out worker, who tells his wife how happy he is living in a work camp.

"Someone's always keen for a bit of tennis, drinks, or a game of pool," he writes, and he has enjoyed a "good ol' yarn with some of the lads".

His words sound dislocated and deliberately unconvincing, as if his wife is supposed to read between the thin-ruled lines and realise there is more to the boom-town story than good jobs, ready overtime and fast money.

© 2007 The Age

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