"I'm just off to buy a pack of smokes" -- Australia's neglect of Papua New Guinea

The death of Sir Michael Somare reminded some in Australia that PNG was once a Territory Governed by Canberra and the recent spike in COVID cases should also remind them how much we owe our nearest neighbour.

 

I’m not talking about Kokoda, although we do owe them for that, I’m talking about decades of neglecting the importance of the relationship we should have with PNG. We have an obligation to our former Territory that extends far beyond thanking them for helping to halt the Japanese advance.

 

As someone who likes to draw parallels, it is interesting to note that in the year PNG gained independence from Australia in September, Indonesia invaded Timor Leste three months later and despite the Timorese providing essentially the same support to the Diggers as the Papuans did at Kokoda during the war, we sat on our hands when they needed us.

 

Although Timor Leste had to wait another twenty-four years to declare independence for the second time, Australia made sure it was first in line to claim the kudos and while we were at it, most of the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. Now I don’t think Whitlam went as far as Howard and Downer did by bugging the cabinet room, but the rape of a fledgling nation wasn’t too dissimilar.

 

Taking advantage of our neighbours is nothing new to White Australia, we’ve been doing it for over a century and a half. Not to mention the century before that (and continuing) where we were happy messing up someone else’s continent until we got a bit bored and decided to enslave what our current failure of a Prime Minister refers to as his “Pacific Family”. Then, when what was known as Blackbirding became illegal, we shipped them back and dumped them on whichever island we ran into first, regardless of whether that had been where they were taken from in the first place, or not.

 

When PNG gained its independence in nineteen seventy-five, Australia decided to give with one hand while taking with the other and regardless of political affiliation, we have done so ever since. At this point, detractors will want to point out that, despite annual cuts to our foreign aid budget in the Pacific, Australia is still the largest donor to our northern neighbour, even with China ramping up its presence in the region. This is true but it is also irrelevant. Papua New Guinea should be one of the wealthiest nations in the Pacific but most of their wealth flows offshore.

 

Australia stripped PNG of its wealth by proxy through an ingenious tactic of offering Australian advisors to the new Parliament who encouraged inexperienced Members to support Australian mining and logging companies being granted leases to dig up or cut down some of the most pristine environments on Earth. The irony of this is that those companies don’t pay tax in Australia anyway. They don’t pay tax anywhere.

 

When I was a young child in Bougainville, before The War, the only major sealed road on the island was from the airport to Panguna mine. Across the track from the house I remember living in was what many people would describe as a “Shanty Town”. It wasn’t. Tarpaulins strung up over sticks to provide meagre shelter from the elements does not scream Shanty Town, it screams Refugee Camp. I wasn’t old enough to realise that our neighbours were displaced on their own land, but I had enough competence to understand that they threw rocks at our house of an evening because they didn’t like us and we kept dogs, not as pets so much, but as a deterrent. With the benefit of hindsight, I am not surprised that they eventually took up arms and kicked the colonisers out.

 

That PNG managed to gain independence as a nation with little bloodshed is something that should be commended in its own right, few other countries have managed to do so, but a cloud of corruption has long hung low over the country. I won’t delve into specific examples because we’ll be here all week but the frequency of corruption allegations against Politicians and Senior Public Servants, including the police and military, speaks for itself. Australia enabled this culture to develop and needs to acknowledge it if we are to have a strong, independent, self-sufficient northern neighbour.

 

By leaving PNG with relatively no infrastructure, Australia essentially handed over the keys after the house was sold only for the new owners to find all of the plumbing and wiring stripped from the dwelling. The health system was inadequate and not fit for purpose while the education system was essentially ignored excepting the children of the ruling class who were often born and educated in Australia. I know this because I was in boarding school with several of them.

 

Without identifying anybody I can say that I attended school with the sons of Prime Ministers, Defence Ministers, a bunch of other Ministers (they switch around a lot), Magistrates, Judges, Police and Tribal Chiefs as well as prominent businesspeople. Most of them could easily afford the fees but when an Australian government scholarship program was scrapped, the majority pulled their kids out. It was predominantly the Papuan boys who left, whereas the white and other immigrant families kept their children at school in the Wonderful Land of Oz. This alone is indicative of the perspective through which PNG is viewed by Australian eyes’, but it needn’t be the case.

 

The position PNG found itself in following it’s vote for self-determination was essentially one of submission to its former colonial masters. Australia was not alone in taking advantage of its former colony, the British and New Zealand were quite happy to contribute to the continued subjugation of peoples who had already endured two-hundred odd years of European occupation. The highest offices in the Judiciary and Public Service mostly went to white people from the Anglosphere who had been recommended by other white people from the Anglosphere as being the best person for the job.

 

Such relationships between the colonialists and the Papua New Guineans provided a fertile environment for corruption to flourish. When a mining company, for example, wanted to mine in a particular province they approached the Governor with offers of building roads, an airport and a hospital. The Governor was excited with the proposal and began lobbying his colleagues in Port Moresby to approve a licence. When the licence was granted, roads were built to service the mine and provided little benefit to the locals as many of them didn’t own a vehicle and few were given a job at the mine. The airport was also built but was used predominately by mine workers and their families because many of the locals couldn’t afford to fly for the same reason they didn’t own a car – the mine hadn’t employed them. The hospital was also surely built but it was a private facility so many of the locals were unable to seek treatment because they didn’t get a job at the mine and were forced to the under-funded Government clinics, which in some cases can be a days’ walk to the next village.

 

If you can see a pattern emerging, you can appreciate that if the foreign companies had bothered to train and employ locals, PNG might not find itself in the pickle it currently does regarding COVID. By not employing the population on whose land they were exploiting for profit those companies kept communities in either poverty or subsistence. This tactic has resulted in a people who are unwilling to seek medical treatment because they either can’t afford it or are too ill to make the journey to a free clinic. Had the mines taken on local apprentices and built vocational training centres to train them at no cost to the apprentice, PNG would have a highly skilled (and highly paid) population who would be able to access adequate health care.

 

The flow on effects of hiring locals extends far beyond hospitals, it results in better housing, better roads and better schools with lower drop-out rates because, although the companies don’t pay tax, their employees do and will demand that the significant portion of their salary being taxed needs to be spent on these things. All of this would have contributed to a better local response because the resources would be available locally. Forty-five years is long enough to have trained at least two generations of tradespeople/University graduates who would encourage their children to stay in school and seek further education when they graduated. That means Nurses, Doctors, Engineers and Scientists, all critical when responding to a Pandemic.

 

Australia’s attitude to PNG has always been reactive rather than proactive. White Australia has a saviour complex, from Colonisation to the present day. We shout to whoever is willing to listen about how good we are when it comes to disaster relief in the Indo-Pacific instead of doing anything constructive when it comes to preparing our nearest neighbours for an independent response to said disasters. Just as Australians think of Aotearoa as our younger sibling whereas they think of us as the drunken uncle, we treat PNG (and the rest of The Pacific) as an errant child who needs to be bailed out. To them we are the father who went out to buy a pack of smokes and never came back but sometimes sent a birthday card.

 

Papua New Guinea should have been able to avoid this current COVID outbreak for several reasons, first being the inadequate health care system which I have addressed earlier and will return to but the elephant in the room is the nation’s porous borders, most notably with Indonesia through the yet to be liberated state of West Papua. Had West Papua been independent (or merged with PNG as some activists’ desire), the entire island of Papua could have been locked down in a similar fashion as Australia, Aotearoa, Fiji and the rest of The Pacific. I’m not saying that all cases in PNG originated in Indonesia, but I’ll put money on the outbreaks in the border provinces being the result of Papuans crossing back and forth as they have always done.

 

Jakarta’s disdain for West Papua is well documented, as are their human rights violations in the province, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Papuans are at the bottom of the list for vaccinations. Indonesia has approached the occupation of West Papua in the same manner as the Dutch. The resources are deemed valuable at the expense of the people who are seen as an irritant on the path to profit. By not shutting its internal borders, Indonesia exposed West Papua to COVID via the flow of workers, soldiers and police to the province from other parts of the country. Uniquely placed as the world’s largest archipelago, Indonesia had an opportunity to lock down every island/province in order to reduce any spread of the virus internally but failed to do so and in the case of West Papua, they don’t care. They would rather the Papuans be dead instead of campaigning for independence.

 

West Papua is a topic I could write another essay about and I intend to do so at some point in the future, but this is supposed to be about how Australia failed PNG and I only mentioned Indonesia because I was given a nudge by someone else who cares about this topic. So, let us return to the abject failing of successive Australian Governments regarding the paired issues of health and education in PNG.

 

When Australia walked away from PNG after independence, we missed what was probably the best opportunity to create an educational and medical research hub on our northern border. Papua New Guinea should be The Pacific’s equivalent to Cuba when it comes to medical research and the training of practitioners for the region. The difference between the two is that Cuba won its independence through combat, whereas PNG was “granted” it after a one-sided negotiation process. The subtlety in the difference might be lost on some but it can essentially be boiled down to Castro nationalising pretty much everything whereas Somare signed a bunch of agreements with foreign companies and Governments allowing them to continue operating as usual. This distinction between the two countries isn’t the only factor to have created such a distortion but it is significant in so much as Cuba being able to retain the majority of export wealth which was invested into schools, universities and hospitals. On the other hand, PNG is still forced to request assistance from its former and current colonial masters (it must be noted that Lizzie is still the Monarch of PNG).

 

Every time Australia, the UK, New Zealand, occasionally Canada and if the USA have a naval vessel nearby that they can send to fly the flag in response to Papua New Guinea’s troubles illustrates the dismissive attitude that the Anglosphere towards The Pacific by framing themselves as Great White Knights come to save the hapless natives (Yes. I did just say that because it’s true and you know it).

 

By crippling PNG as it voted to find its feet, Australia perpetrated possibly the greatest disservice to an ally and friend we ever could. On second thought, Timor Leste didn’t need to be occupied by Indonesia for a quarter of a century, but I’m getting off point again. What Australia did and continues to do, not only to PNG but all of The Pacific needs to be recognised as an example of failed policy regarding our nearest neighbours. Had we left Papua New Guinea with infrastructure comparable to ours at the time and continued to invest in it, we could have the world’s best tropical diseases research centre on our doorstep and before you say that Australia should have that honour, you are completely missing the point. PNG may be sixteen odd years behind Cuba when it comes to independence but that should never have been an impediment for Papua New Guinea to have developed into a regional powerhouse of medicinal and vocational training.

 

For a country with an abundance of natural resources such as Papua New Guinea, to have to ask for assistance when a crisis strikes says more about Australia than it does about PNG. The money that has flowed out of the country into the bank accounts of foreign companies could and should have been invested educating, training and employing the population instead of increasing the inheritance of already privileged people. But if this were to have happened, the Anglosphere would have not been the beneficiaries of positive media coverage whenever they decided to react to an emergency that PNG should have the resources and infrastructure to not require any help. In fact, had PNG been allowed to realise it’s potential, they would be exporting professionals to assist other countries in the region when required.

 

Imagine if PNG was able to deploy highly skilled medical professionals throughout The Pacific in times of crisis, but also, that they trained a significant number of said professionals who were already practicing their craft in their country of origin when said crisis hit. PNG is a country that still deals with tuberculosis and malaria outbreaks on a regular basis. That should be enough to justify the establishment of a world leading Infectious and Tropical Diseases Institute, albeit half a century too late but we have to come to the realisation that COVID is not a “once in a hundred-year event”. This is going to happen again in most of our lifetimes and probably sooner than many people expect.

 

Were Papua New Guinea at the forefront of infectious diseases research from the point of independence, they may have been the first country in the world to have developed a COVID vaccine. Had they the capability to produce it in country, they might have already begun exporting it across the Torres Strait to bail out the Morrison Government’s abject failure of a vaccine rollout in Australia instead of us sending a paltry eight-thousand vaccinations and a handful of AUSMAT medicos to get in the way of local practitioners.

 

To say that Australia’s response to Papua New Guinea’s current COVID predicament is lacking would be too gracious a criticism levelled at every Australian Government from Whitlam onwards. We left PNG with nothing and over the subsequent decades Australia has done little more than foreign policy window dressing when it comes to assisting our former territory and nearest neighbour (with a strong wind at your back, you can probably spit from Saibai to PNG) and our COVID response is simply a continuation of this practice.

 

Of all the Pacific Nations, PNG was recognised early on in the pandemic as being amongst the most vulnerable and should have been the focus of Australia’s international response to the pandemic. Instead, Dutton decided to let the virus boat Ruby Princess dock and disperse her occupants around the country and globe. With outbreaks popping up all over the place, Australia (well, the States and Territories) responded better than most of the world in eradicating the virus internally and when that was done, our priority should have been preventing something similar happening in our region. But once more this shouldn’t be the case. It must be noted that Australia and New Zealand were the best placed countries to provide assistance prior to an outbreak in PNG but neglected to do so.

 

Instead of offering assistance from the ADF (as the Papua New Guineans did with their military during the bushfires that Morrison nicked off to Hawaii for) we closed the Torres Strait border to traditional trading but let FIFO workers come and go as they pleased. Closing the border did a good job of protecting the Torres Strait Islanders but allowing mine workers (who would not be required had there been a local workforce) to potentially carry the virus into PNG was negligent at the very least. But there were profits to made by party donors and who really cares if Cairns Base Hospital has to refuse everyone except the most urgent emergency cases because a bunch of FIFO workers come back with COVID.

 

Australia’s attitude to Papua New Guinea well before they became independent from us continues to this day and that is one of disdain. Our political class have developed a rhetoric along the lines of “PNG is a sovereign nation and they messed up the whole independence thing, so we have to go save them again”. This would not be a problem, were it true, but unfortunately this is not the fault of PNG and Australia needs to realise it was the one who messed up the whole independence thing. By actively condoning the corrupt practices of Australian and other foreign companies in their exploitation of Papua New Guinea’s resources, we as a nation are guilty of negligence for no other reason than we continue to elect Politicians who seek to exploit PNG to their own advantage.

 

We really shouldn’t be surprised that we have treated PNG with such contempt, we’ve been doing it in Australia to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for two and half centuries and it took around three quarters of that time for the original inhabitants of the continent and surrounding islands to be recognised as human. To the credit of State and Territory Health Departments, the virus was unable to gain a foothold in remote communities thanks to lockdowns and community led public service announcements regarding COVID safe practices, such measures may have also been effective in PNG, but foreign policy is The Commonwealth’s responsibility and once more it has failed Papua New Guinea.

 

Putting aside the initial failure of Australia to invest at independence, instead favouring the “let’s play the hero” role, the Morrison Government has failed to even do that. Had we offered medical assistance and materiel as soon as most of Australia had flattened the curve it is possible that PNG may have been able to contain the virus before it spread. I’m not speaking of the meagre deployments and shipments that are little more than token gestures of pretending to care, I’m suggesting that a mass deployment of medical teams with the ADF providing the logistical support required to establish field hospitals in remote areas of PNG could have nipped this outbreak at the bud.

 

What we are witnessing in Papua New Guinea right now is an example of how Corporate Colonialism can cripple a country. By not investing in infrastructure, the companies who were effectively given control of the young nation set PNG up to fail when faced with a crisis such as this pandemic.

When profit is put before people, this will always be the case regardless of the emergency. By robbing emerging nations of their wealth and opportunity, the Colonial powers established a corrupt world order designed purely to prevent developing nations becoming “developed”.  One only need to look at Africa, Asia and South America to find multiple similar examples of what PNG has been subjected to after gaining independence from their colonial masters. It is not unique. It has been and continues to be common practice in colonies around the globe.

 

If the world is going to confront global issues such as pandemics and the undeniable impacts of climate change, the colonial and neo-colonial powers need to acknowledge the mistreatment of their current and former subjects is a practice that is detrimental to us all. By continuing to allow corporations to run roughshod over countries that were invaded and occupied for centuries is negligent and irresponsible conduct by those nations who were and continue to be the invaders and occupiers.

Ask a Kid from The Coalfields

 It was probably a cold day in Cromwell. It’s usually cold in Otago, but I can’t remember. The only sensation my memory throws up is one of excitement. Mum had just asked us if we wanted to move to Australia and live with Dad again.

 

Unbeknownst to me, my parents were officially separated at the time.

 

I’d been under the impression that we’d left Bougainville because of the war and Dad stayed because his job as the wharf’s foreman was important.

 

When the situation became too dangerous for Panguna mine to continue operating Dad returned to Australia to find work, eventually ending up in Blackwater. Following his To Her Door moment, he asked Mum if we would join him. To this day I’m not sure she would have if it weren’t for the enthusiasm expressed by myself and her other child.

 

Blackwater is representative of most Queensland mining towns in so much as it is a shithole – a town so flat that the only slope suitable for a hill start when taking your driving test is the library’s driveway. The persistent dry heat was something I had no recollection of experiencing in my six years post-birth. Windows and doors were left open, provided they had fly screens on them.

 

I remember our first dinner when the kitchen screens were blanketed with flies as Mum made Spag Bol. I also recall having to run around shutting windows when the wind was blowing the wrong way and coal dust or dirt would engulf the town. Asthma was rife among the children I found myself attempting to be educated with and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the ground water is contaminated. Once, some genius at the water treatment plant forgot to flick the “clean the water” switch and every faucet in town was dispersing water straight from Bedford Weir similar to the colour and consistency you expel from your bowel when suffering Salmonella poisoning.

 

It wasn’t all bad. There was a BMX track until they closed it, a Drive-In until “The Thursday Storm” sent a section of the screen through the uninsured projection room and the town pool wasn’t terrible except it was shut over “winter”. Like the rest of Queensland, Blackwater folk know that anything below thirty degrees Celsius is cold and it doesn’t get hot until the mercury hits forty (if you hear a Queenslander complaining about the heat and it’s in the thirties, you just need to wait for “the temperature’s fine, it’s the fucking humidity”).

 

Aside from that there were two rugby league clubs, Aussie rules, pony, soccer, golf, tennis and all the other clubs that exist in regional towns of medium size. But there was still nothing to do. Sure, I played league for a while, soccer for a bit, Tae Kwon Do and maybe two or three rounds of golf, but Blackwater is a town that by its very nature forces children to entertain and educate themselves. Trust me, if you ever need someone to catch some yabbies, herd a peacock and his hens into your backyard or build a bomb from common household products, ask a kid from The Coalfields.

 

We were able to develop these skills because we had little parental supervision and really only saw the police if venturing near the highway.

 

It’s not like either entities were absent. Before Mum became the weekend librarian, she was a stay at home parent. On my first day of school I took the scenic route home because I had no idea which way home was. Being prone to panic Mum called the cops to report me missing. I just rode around town until I recognised some buildings Dad had driven past on our first entry to Blackwater as a family and oriented myself.

 

I was only a block away from my new abode when a marked police car pulled up beside me. The officer inside addressed me by name and instructed me to put my bike in the boot so he could drive me the hundred-odd metres to my house. Don’t start me on White Privilege, I had no idea what that was when I was six, I mention it only to demonstrate that this was the single interaction I had with the local cops in the half-dozen years I lived in Blackwater full-time. Of course we had a PCYC at which I attended events occasionally and sometimes I’d have to accompany a parent to the local station on an administrative task, but they never came after me for blowing shit up, trespassing, or any of my other indiscretions, of which there were many.

 

I won’t say that Blackwater turned me into a Hustler, but it was definitely where the foundations were laid.

 

My Mother will suggest to you that I was led astray by the company I kept. This suggestion is wrong. If anything, the opposite is true, and Mum really needs to shoulder some of the responsibility for her child’s criminality. It’s not her fault, but not to identify her as a complicit enabler would be negligent of me.

 

As I have already mentioned, Mum was the replacement librarian for a few years and because it wasn’t feasible for me to spend all my time at the houses of the two or three friends I had when both parents were working, the Library became something of a second home. This became problematic around the time I’d exhausted all of the age appropriate fiction and graduated to the sex heavy, guns and killing people section of the book depository. A literary diet of special agents, detectives, mercenaries and soldiers accompanied by a regular injection of non-fiction serial killers, war and rape is probably not the best education for a child but it served to open my eyes to the wider world and the complexity of the human condition.

 

Comic books were another medium that opened my eyes, but without many of those in the library, I had to venture to one of the newsagents to get my fix. There were two to choose from and in some strange confluence of Capitalism and Misogyny, both decided to stock the Comics next to the Porn. While the Comics appealed to a pair of my greatest loves, those being reasonable art and passable dialogue, there was always an urge to pick up the magazines to my left.

 

I can’t remember when I subversively (not subversively) started thumbing through the smut pile, but I was probably eleven or twelve when, heart pounding in a different style to what  it had ever in the past, palms sweating and ready to ride home in shame when refused service for attempting to buy pornographic material, I picked a magazine from the shelf and walked to the counter.

 

The girl behind that counter looked at the cover and asked me for the price printed there.

 

She smiled at me, this girl, only a couple of years older than myself, as I fumbled with the shrapnel in haste to pay her, worried she might change her mind, stuffing the magazine down my shorts. She smiled at me as I handed over four or five two buck coins’ I’d earned from baking cakes. She smiled at me as I scurried out the door on my way to revel in masturbatory glory before my parents got home and she smiled into the future as I swiftly became a regular consumer of pornography from that store.

 

This is the part where the blocks start falling into place. What I had figured out by this juncture is that if you don’t have to pay for anything related to produce the product supplied, you will be making one hundred percent profit. From baking cakes to peddling pictures of pussy might seem a bit of a stretch so you’ll have to bear with me as I unpack this.

 

My Father taught me how to weld, drive a car, cook savoury food, operate a drill/grinder/[insert power tool here] and swear like a sailor after smashing my thumb with a hammer, but it was my Mother who taught me how to bake.

 

It wasn’t something I’d planned, but on a whim one day I asked Mum if she would pay me two dollars to bake a cake.

 

When she agreed, I embarked on a determined campaign to bake as many cakes as I could in the shortest amount of time possible. This foray into catering funded the aforementioned purchase of my first pornographic magazine and many more, only because I wasn’t paying for anything required to bake the cakes.

 

When The Universe decided to intervene and set me on my path it was bright and sunny outside, but I was ensconced in my room with my left hand turning pages while the right was otherwise occupied. I’d taken advantage of Mum being in the backyard, hanging out the washing (At that age, five minutes is easily enough time). I was interrupted when the phone rang and stashed the magazine under the permanent pile of crap beneath my desk. Expecting the caller to be someone seeking conversation with one of my parents, I was pleasantly surprised to find one of my friends on the other end of the line asking if I wanted to go and hang out at his place. I yelled my request for permission from the kitchen and Mum granted it.

 

Deciding that the odds of her entering my room were pretty low, I left the magazine where it was, ran downstairs, jumped on my bike and headed off to Haggis’ place for air-conditioning and pay TV.

 

Cutting through the high school, I rode behind the manual arts block where inside a skip-bin I had previously found the briefcase which, after some persistence I’d managed to unlock and turned into my smut safe. It is only with hindsight that I realise the significance of this moment. At the time, I was wholly fixated on getting to my mates and watching Soft Porn dressed up as Sci-Fi/Action movies.

 

Meanwhile Mum had decided that day was ideal for cleaning my room. She must have been bored because that was a task designated as mine. There was no phone call demanding my return home, so I spent the afternoon blissfully ignorant, watching boobs bracketed by bombs in climate-controlled comfort as my Mother toiled and discovered my spoils.

 

An offer to stay for dinner was not forthcoming that night so I headed home at the regular time (for those who grew up in cities, it’s when the streetlights come on).

 

After parking my bike and checking on the Guinea Pigs, I headed upstairs with the intention of restoring my magazine to its rightful place in the briefcase only to find a spotless room, sans porn. The briefcase was still there so I wasn’t entirely bereft but the magazine in question was nowhere to be seen.

 

I’d been busted.

 

Having become quite adept at the ancient art of getting away with shit by not being caught in the act – this was a serious failure on my part. I was no stranger to punishment, which probably explains my ability to wriggle out of receiving some.

 

Anticipating the inevitable moment when Mum would confront me with the incriminating document, I scrambled to prepare a justification.

 

She appeared in the doorway with a smug look on her face and one hand behind her back.

 

As is her wont, Mum stated the bleeding obvious by informing me that my room had been cleaned before revealing the unescapable fact that in the process a magazine had been unearthed. With more flourish than was necessary she revealed her prize and began casually flicking through the pages while I mounted my defence, which was essentially that I intended to sell it to another boy at school (this was not my intention). Whether she bought the justification or not, the magazine was handed over to me with a smile and words that have stuck with me forever.

 

‘I’m glad you’re interested in girls’

 

Her tacit approval surprised me and not only because I didn’t get in trouble but because in a few months I would be shipped off to an “elite” all boys boarding school in Brisbane. This isn’t abnormal for kids in the regions but most of them are farmer’s children, whereas my Father was a miner and I’m a miner’s son. Dad was still a Diesel Fitter at this point and while my parents could pay the school fees, they couldn’t afford to.

 

Being a (relatively) poor kid in a (very) rich school forced me to diversify my entrepreneurial endeavours as I lacked the facilities to bake cakes, even though the market was definitely there. I found myself in a situation where I was receiving ten dollars a week in pocket money while my peers were averaging between fifty and a hundred.

 

I had to do something.

 

In Blackwater I’d sold personalised drawings to classmates for a dollar or two, so I tried that, but the privileged class will only support The Arts if it benefits them – which is why I decided to start writing Smut. Having always been a fan of the written word, I especially enjoyed Penthouse Forum and took to mimicking the style of their writers. I managed to sell a few before actual magazines began turning up in the dorm, usually bought from a boy in an upper grade.

 

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

 

With only ten bucks regular income I had to find another revenue source and Porn was clearly a commodity in a hormonally charged all-male environment. It was the obvious choice. There were a few hurdles to clear before I could get my business up and running but it wasn’t long before I had a plan in place.

 

The first thing I needed was somewhere to steal Porn from, but being forced to wear the uniform whenever we went to the shops, meant I had to acquire myself some day boy friends who could facilitate me getting the fuck out of school over the weekends. Not being recognised as being on the Asperger’s Spectrum until my mid-thirties probably explains the difficulties I experienced during my adolescence when it came to social interactions, but I managed to make a few mates.

 

With that obstacle overcome, the next was to locate a secure storage space for my product. Having been found in possession of a prohibited magazine early on in my incarceration, I was well aware that to keep the material in the boarding house would result in more lectures about morality from the reverend, possibly a caning and my parents would be informed (Not that my Mother would care, she had a Penthouse waiting for me the first time I came home on holidays. Weird, right?). The reality was that although my parents wouldn’t discipline me for something they clearly didn’t see as a serious character flaw – the school would.

 

Noticing that there were more day boy lockers than day boys. I used my meagre funds to invest in a padlock and secured an empty locker in the area allocated to the sporting house my mates were in.

 

All that was required now was to stock my shelves.

 

Shoplifting was a practice I had only dabbled in up to this point – a chocolate bar or one of those blister packs that used to be stuck on the cover of a magazine with a toy of some sort inside. Small things. Inconsequential really, but that had been my training and it was all I had. In the examples I had seen on the small and big screens, you would always be busted if you tried to stuff something down your waistband.

 

Having taken up skateboarding and the associated fashion of the time, I found myself decked out in cargo shorts that allowed me to stand next to my prize and slide the magazine up my leg into my waistband. After a few test-runs on the cheaper publications near the bottom of the racks proved successful, I upped my game and started going for the sought-after titles. While Picture and People had been easy enough to sell, they weren’t turning the profit I was after. Even though they were contraband they were considered second rate, Penthouse and particularly Hustler were highly prized, but the publications sold in sealed bags could make me a fortune.

 

With greater risk, come greater riches.

 

When the compulsory uniform rule outside school grounds was scrapped, I’d perfected my method of acquiring stock. Even took a few private jobs for kids who didn’t have the courage to steal it themselves but wanted a particular product (obviously a surcharge was applied), but The Locker was the main earner.

 

The business model was simple – cheap were two dollars, the higher shelves were two dollars less than cover price and the sealed bags were two dollars above it. Remember, this is all profit and the reason I wasn’t just charging the advertised price is because the bagged books were obviously not “used” (yes, that is the sort of language we employed), even though mine weren’t, I managed to undercut anyone else who was charging cover price for “used” porn. By the time I was in grade ten, I was the guy in the older grade that kids bought their porn from.

 

While I wouldn’t suggest I was rolling in cash I was making enough to think about diversifying again.

 

In prisons the world over, cigarettes are a commodity and this one was no different. It wasn’t too difficult finding customers willing to pay at least five bucks more per packet than I had. There was also a steady market in individual smokes for a dollar or a service. When I had been “gated” (grounded) or was too lazy to walk to Domino’s or 7-11, a couple of darts was considered fair payment to get someone else to do it.

 

By grade eleven I’d added alcohol to my repertoire to see off a severe drop in revenue from the porn sales due mainly to the internet becoming faster. I was also too busy fucking my girlfriend (who was into porn and had internet) to be overly concerned about the ejaculatory desires of others.

 

The Locker had moved locations as the terms and years ticked by. Sometimes of my own volition, on others because a locker inspection had occurred, and my stash had been discovered. Because I didn’t use a school issued lock and The Locker wasn’t allocated to anyone, the bolt cutters had to be employed. I was never present on these occasions as I would be standing next to my bed (room by this point in the narrative) but would be told the inevitable when classes resumed and wrote it off as a business expense.

 

Dad graduated Uni and got a job at the same mine, but out from under the grease. My pocket money gradually increased to the hundred dollars my peers had been receiving in grade eight. Some of them were now getting five.

 

I’d begun avoiding Blackwater and would take any opportunity not to return (excluding suspensions, two overnight train trips turned a three-day suspension into a five-day holiday).

 

My last visit to the town that had moulded me into a fat kid who could entertain himself because he was awkward around people, then turned to porn because girls weren’t interested in him was probably at the end of grade ten. I’d begrudgingly gone home for a few weeks over christmas because no one else would have me until New Year’s Eve, only to find nothing had really changed in Blackwater. Most of my friends had moved away years ago but aside from that, it was the same as the day I left when I was thirteen. It was me that had changed.

 

Taller, faster and stronger, most of my fat had turned to muscle. I would jog around town clicking my fingers in time with my footfalls. Body dysmorphia had made exercise something of a religion to me.

 

Some of the blokes I’d been friendly with in primary school rocked up to the pool one night when I was swimming laps. Being both deluded and dedicated to my regime, I reacted poorly when the son of my old league coach decided to tackle me in the shallows as I was turning to start a new lap. Kicking away from him without acknowledgement in order to finish my self-imposed kilometre, I cemented in their minds the idea that I was a privileged prick from a private school.

 

They weren’t wrong, I’d been indoctrinated but would only figure it out after I left the pool without even waving farewell, I essentially shut the door on Blackwater. I thought it offered me nothing.

 

For the rest of my stay if I wasn’t exercising or eating, I was writing something or reading a book. I existed in Blackwater but was removed from it. There were no longer calls to ask me to go yabbying or anyone to herd peahens with if they happened to turn up again. I’d given up on building bombs myself by this point but if an invitation to an explosion was forthcoming, I would have been the first to RSVP.

 

I accompanied my parents to Dad’s christmas party where I discovered that desk drivers have different parties to workers who sweat. Being the only child deemed old enough to drink mid strength beer, I stood with my Father and his co-workers until I was bored enough to walk home. For some reason, this is my last memory of Blackwater, I can’t even remember if I left by car or train when I returned to Brisbane.

 

Despite Mum giving me the option of leaving school and getting an apprenticeship, I went back and selected subjects I could pass with minimal effort. Learning has never been hard for me, but I can honestly say that coasting through the last two years of school and graduating with a mid-range final score that matched the best score achieved by Blackwater State High was somewhat satisfying. It’s also indicative of the gap between bush public schools and their private counterparts in the city. I know this because the woman with the highest score from Blackwater was smarter than me.

 

For my final two years I was granted the privilege of signing out to the unit my parents had bought, under my own volition, which was probably all that prevented me from being expelled and likely contributed to me securing the aforementioned girlfriend.

 

While The Locker had never been linked to me I was regularly in trouble for a wide range of infractions and spent those last two years on a good behaviour contract.

 

In one’s final year of boarding school it is customary to pass on the responsibilities that somehow ended up being yours to a younger child. I handed off the duty of bearing the house shield to intraschool competitions, to a farmer’s boy, which resulted in it being nicked for the first time in four years, forcing me to be involved in fisticuffs to ensure it’s safe return.

 

The Locker was my creation but warranted a transfer of ownership in the spirit of condoned traditions, despite undermining the establishment housing it.

 

Not wanting to repeat my mistake with the shield, I interviewed extensively because I realised the school needed it. The administration wouldn’t have approved but they were incompetent – I’d run a black market under their noses for almost five years and it had to remain a thorn in their side.

 

What I realised in my final days when choosing my successor was that a shithole mining town had provided me with the skill set required to operate a criminal enterprise in an authoritarian environment for half a decade. I needed a Hustler to continue operation of The Locker so I did what anyone with sense would do and asked a kid from The Coalfields.