I’d learnt a few tricks when working in west oz and doing my apprenticeship with ‘uncle chip’. He told me, you can’t fight all the racists, it doesn’t work, you’ll wear yourself out…. if you really want to fuck them, tell them a story.
I was working in the Tanami desert, supposedly Australia’s most isolated mine, six hundred kilometres west of Alice springs, or if I missed the plane from Darwin, a two day drive, a decent amount of which was on dirt, with fuel stops charging between double and triple the price of diesel back in D town.
I’d only missed the flight once, it was first day back after a four month brake.
lucky for me Kingy saw the funny side and the pride of the fleet, ‘black loving’ was loaded up in town.
‘black lovin’ was an eighties series, Toyota landcruiser tray back Kingy had picked up, for a few grand, then painted matt black, before throwing on the necessary isolator, CV radio and other bullshit to make it mine spec’d and probably cost more than what he paid for the vehicle.
To this day I can’t figure out if it was a racist slur or not, ‘black lovin’ was, actually still is, probably the best vehicle I’ve ever driven… and it was somehow a total shitbox at the same time.
At the start and the end of each twelve hour day on that fourteen day swing we drove back and forth from camp to the actual mine which was seventy kilometres and took half an hour and the ascent and descent along a fourteen kilometre gravel track that went vertically down underground one kilometre, which could take anywhere between twenty minutes and two hours… the point being, I was spending a lot of time sitting in ‘black lovin’ and telling stories seemed like a good idea.
Gav was near enough to twice my size, a concrete formworker from queensland, he had a tattoo of a tall ship on one calf, it was really nice, surprisingly so for a jail tattoo. I told him the story of Captain Morgan, the bloke on the rum bottle, he was a real life character, imagine Usama Bin Laden if he wasn’t dick less and knew how to party… so basically a fan of slavery, a mass murder who drinks rum but doesn’t need absurd fairy tales to justify destruction and he sure as shit didn’t need his own death to justify raping virgins, he just liked to loot, pillage and plunder… because he could.
I thought by telling Gav this story I would be making a point about mining, turns out I was wrong. Gav wanted me to draw Captain Morgan so he could get it tattooed. I said no.