Eleven days as a slave aboard a craft: the roster, the rocks, the data entry

I have read the other accounts on this site and most of them are what I’d call the short stay. In and out, a night, a procedure, a mark on the leg, home before the dog’s up. No disrespect to Cheryl, who I know has done the numbers, but I would like to put on record an account of what happens when they keep you. Because I was kept. Eleven days. And I worked every one of them.

Collection

I was taken from the fence line on the Ilfracombe road on the evening of 3 March. I remember the light and I remember thinking “oh, here we go”, which I understand is common. I did not get the bench. I went straight through to what I can only describe as a back-of-house area, and a being I came to think of as the Supervisor handed me a sort of smooth grey tablet with a list on it. The list was my shifts.

I want to stress this. They had a roster. Laminated, near enough. Six on, one off. The one off was not a day, it was a period of about four hours in which the lights dimmed slightly.

The work

There were two jobs and you alternated.

Rocks. A conveyor, roughly a kilometre long, Supervisor says, bringing through rocks. Ordinary rocks, as far as I could tell. Red ones, grey ones, a lot of what I’d call gibber. Your job was to sort them into four bins. There were no labels on the bins and no instructions. When I asked, by thinking it very hard, how I was supposed to know which bin, the Supervisor sent back a feeling that I can only translate as “by vibe”. So that’s what I did. For six hours. I got faster. By day four I would pick up a rock and just know it was a bin three rock, and I still don’t know what that means, and I still do it with gravel at home.

Data entry. A console, a long list of what looked like cattle ear-tag numbers, and a second column you had to fill in from a sheet. The sheet was in their writing. The console was in ours. I was transcribing. I did not know what, and I did not ask after the first time, because the Supervisor got what I’d call “a look” about him, even though he hasn’t got a face as such.

I will say one of the tag numbers was QLD-0447-B. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I do now.

Conditions

The food was a paste. It tasted like the smell of a new tent. There was as much of it as you wanted, which was not much. We slept in a recess in the wall that fitted you exactly, which is the single most unsettling thing that happened and I include the rocks.

There were others. Four or five, rotating. A Dutch bloke who’d been there longer than me and had been made a sort of leading hand. A woman from somewhere near Mildura who did the data entry much faster than me and let me know it. We didn’t talk much. You’re tired. You’ve got the vibe to think about.

Nobody was cruel. That’s the thing people want you to say, and I can’t. Nobody hit anyone. Nobody raised what passes for a voice. It was just work, endless work, without a why, for people who never said thank you. Which, if I’m honest, is not that different from the council.

Release

On the eleventh day the Supervisor came to the conveyor, stood next to me for a bit, and then handed me a second grey tablet. On it, in English, very neat, was a reference.

Then I was on the fence line on the Ilfracombe road, in daylight, with the tablet in my hand and eleven days of beard. The tablet went dull about an hour later and is now just a smooth grey thing I keep on the dash.

Afterwards

Nobody at home believed me, naturally, except my brother-in-law, who said it explained why I’d come back “weirdly good at gravel”. I did use the reference. I put it in with an application for a store job in town. I didn’t say who it was from. I got the job, and the manager said it was the most honest reference he’d ever read, especially the bit about not asking questions.

I don’t know what the rocks were for. I don’t know who the ear tags belonged to or where they are now. I do know that somewhere up there, right now, there is a conveyor, and a bin three, and a Dutch bloke who has probably been made assistant manager by now, and I think about him more than I think about most people I actually know.

Graeme asked us to note that he has recovered fully, apart from the gravel, and that if the Supervisor is reading this, he would consider returning on a casual basis if the paste situation has improved.

Document U8MC-08-0302. Status: UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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