FIFO seen as way to keep best staff
Peter Kerr,
The West Australian
October 19, 2012
Here's what I think of FIFO
When I was a kid growing up in the south-west of Western
Australia there was a mining town just up the road. Even though it was already
in decline and most of the fifteen hotels in the main street were long gone, it
still frightened my mother.
She would say: “I don’t like all those men drinking in the
hotels when they should be home looking after their families.”
That town has had more than one resurgence over the past twenty
years but most of the workers have never lived there ─ they drive in and drive out. As a consequence, the town
remains near death.
My family and I saw plenty of mining towns in the 50s and
60s. We had cousins all over Western Australia and often visited them. In the
late 1950s I took a trip to the Goldfields with an uncle and auntie and the
difference between my small, rural hamlet and the bustling aggression of
Kalgoorlie and Norseman was palpable. In those days there was no FIFO but the towns
were dominated by men and no visit to Kalgoorlie was ever complete without a
drive through Hay Street’s famous line of brothels.
A recent Four Corners program (May 2, 2012) concentrated on
one small town in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, Moranbah, population 53,000. The
town suffers from a population explosion, with services designed for its
original expected population of 23,000. Now it is burgeoning with an excess of
single men, or married men on their own.
Over the last two years the Mackay-Moranbah regional crime
statistics make startling reading: common assault up 7%, domestic violence
order breaches up 26%, sexual offences up 16%, and rape and attempted rape up
96%.
Developers in Mooranbah are tearing down family homes and
putting up units. Shops are closing. A town is dying, yet its population is
exploding.
Mining towns have been dominated by men since the Roman
Empire and before— and, like our ancestors, we continue to get it wrong.
When I was twelve my parents packed me off to boarding
school in Perth. It was a family tradition ─ my father had gone, as had his father before him. My older
brother was into his third year when I arrived for my first. Those five years
were the first in almost a decade living with men, in shared accommodation, in
boarding houses and single men’s quarters.
One thing remains clear to me about men ─ all too often they are not good
at living on their own or in large single-sex groups. We know from many reports
on the education sector in recent years that boys generally study better with
girls in the classroom, yet we fail to plan our mining towns while
understanding that men are better off with women in their homes and communities.
I lived in all-male shared-houses throughout rural Western
Australia and worked for a year as a bank clerk in Papua New Guinea. Our lives in
the men-only boarding houses were full of misogynistic banter, random sex with
local women and the occasional brawl. After more than a decade living an
all-male lifestyle, it took me three long-term relationships to recover from
the damage done and to settle down and learn a number of necessary truths about
the other gender.
In my first novel, Boy
on a Wire, I have explored the impact an all-male community can have on
pubescent boys. My second novel, To the
Highlands, explores a male dominated expatriate community in all the horror
of its misogynism, racism, and brutality. It is not surprising then that my
early experiences would fill me with dread of a FIFO lifestyle.
