Boots

I had worn out my elastic-sided boots and was taking them to be repaired at Whyalla’s biggest shopping centre, called Westlands (the place where Bob Hawke in his ‘91 election campaign called someone a ‘silly old bugger’). Nico stopped me, saying, ‘Don’t go there. Take them to the old Scottish bloke. Here I’ll find his address... Bill, that’s his name. He’s much cheaper - but he’s on the juice most of the time.’ And he made a bottle-tipping gesture with his thumb and fist.

Nico was going in for some wool bale clips and gave me a lift in his truck; twenty kilometres along the straight road beside the ore line from Iron Knob, our passage marked by the metronome of metal telegraph poles, taller than the myall trees and salt bush roundabouts. A few kilometres short of town, just before the speedway, Nico veered off the bitumen onto a dirt track. ‘Got something to show you - why we don’t run sheep in these paddocks any more.’ After five minutes we came out onto a claybed and pulled up below the red ochre of a dam bank. ‘Dad’s father, old Andrew, sunk this dam in 1947 and this summer’s only the second time it’s been dry twice since then. Its real name is Koleroo Dam but everyone in Whyalla calls it Yabbie Dam.’ We got out of the car and climbed the bank. The concrete tank was pock-marked like a wall in downtown Beirut and the water trough had been rammed and lay slumped in three pieces. The windmill, with ‘Comet’ stencilled on its fantail, was toppled sideways, its vanes perforated to lace by target practice. An upturned car wreck, a twisted shopping trolley and a mud-stained computer lay on the cracked dam floor. We took a piss on the dry dirt, Nico shaking his head at the destruction. ‘If I you got paid $5 for every virgin who’s lost it out here you’d be a rich man.’

He dropped me at Bill’s place which wasn’t far from Westlands, in a street of small ochre-brick state houses, a bit the worse for wear, though not without their individual touches. When I dropped the boots off (entering through the back gate as instructed) he came out in a dirty white singlet and shorts. The backyard was congested with all sorts of forty-four and ten gallon drums linked by bits of pipe which he told me collected every drop of water from his roof. There were two beds of shrivelled vegetables. He opened up his big back shed to reveal an enormous grinding and polishing machine dating from the 1940’s - it must have weighed tons. He told me he’d once had a shop in Port Augusta and a shoe store too. He liked to talk (and I never mind having a Scottish voice wash over me). There are a lot of Scots in Whyalla, brought out to work in the shipyards and steelworks, many from the banks of the Clyde. Billy Connolly was a big hit when he did a show here (until word got out that he’d said in an interview that ‘Whyalla’s a great place to go for an enema’ and now he is black-banned, not that I think he really cares). Old Bill inspected my boots with tremulous hands and showed me the bad stitching on the elastic gussets made by the previous repairer: ‘My stitching doesn’t waver like that’.

When I returned a few days later to pick up the boots he sent me out again to get the exact money because he was ‘skint’ he said. When I came back he had a shirt on and his teeth in - very white with bits of bread caught between them. There was an HQ wagon in the drive roughly hand-painted in silver and blue with rust already starting to come through the paint. Told me he’d been D.U.I.’d and was coming off his ban next week. He’d modified the rubber on the roll-down tailgate window to stop water getting through to the bottom panel. It was done in a most complicated manner using shoe sole rubber and numerous screws and bolts to hold it tight against the glass. He asked me if I was married and had kids and before I could reply started telling me how he had ‘told the wife to fuck off eight years ago - best thing I ever did’. I interrupted and said thanks but I had to go. In fact I was off to see Elaine who lived a dozen blocks away and did tailoring in her spare bedroom. All the windows of Elaine’s place have the blinds drawn and it takes your eyes a while to adjust from the glare outside and notice that the walls of every room are lined with pictures of Cliff Richard.

On the way there, at a set of traffic lights, an electrician’s van (an ex-ambulance Ford 500) pulled up and burbled beside me. Its duco was completely covered with quotes from the Bible (King James version) and declamatory prophesies neatly painted in different styles and colours. On the driver’s door I read: ‘SATAN IS COMING - AND HE WILL BE ANGRY’. Later that day in Delprat terrace I watched a tubby man in blue BHP workclothes unload a sack of seed from a blue Volkswagen onto a blue wheelbarrow and wheel it out to a blue-framed cage of racing pigeons at the end of his drive. Whyalla is like that some days - you feel surrounded by people pursuing their obsessions.

There is a front fence in Essington-Lewis Street with all the notes of Rolf Harris’s ‘Tie me Kangaroo down Sport’ cut out of sheet steel and welded onto the stave and bar lines of its metal frame. A Polish man used to run the fish shop nearby, but didn’t eat fish. He said he didn’t like it. ‘Try the bream. It’s good today,’ he’d tell you. And Tom Tyce from Texas, a lay preacher from a fundamentalist sect of the Presbyterian Church, had a dream which told him to come to Whyalla and gather up a congregation. His flock was tiny if it existed at all and he loved to come out to Middleback Station to muster sheep on his bike. He taught his two dogs to roll over and play dead when he pointed at them with a pretend gun. But he didn’t wait around for Satan and took his family back to the States last year.

My boots haven’t felt quite the same since old Bill worked on them. Perhaps he eased a little more leather out from all around the soles, for even with two thick pairs of socks on, they’re too sloppy. But the stitching on the soles and gussets is good - as equally spaced and unwavering as the poles along the line to Iron Knob.