This is a response to a piece about Meekathara, a remote gold mining town 850km north of Perth. It’s not a critique, or an attack on it because I bloody loved the piece. I loved the way it meandered through the town, grabbed its hard edges and tight spots and kissed them firmly on the lips. This is the response from the city. The place where life ‘slides by so fast, you've got to watch out you don't get caught in its slipstream’. Because, see, I’m from the city. I’m from one of those big smelly places where people are false and life does move at quite an unseemly pace. Millions of people packed together all doing what it takes. This is about what is, for me at least, real in that place, because believe me I feel just as uncomfortable in the Brisbane (a swanky pub) as any country fella. I feel just as much the fish out of water in a lift full of suits and steel and I feel just as slow witted and wide eyed when faced with the slicker sides of the city. But there is a rawness here in the big smoke too. There is that hard edged humanity that is, for me, our defining feature, our messy and muddled and oft times almost insane personality. I think the reality of a true city pub, its dirty carpet, worn from work boots and Friday night wildness, reverberating to the chorus of the woes of work and the gentle click and clunk of pool balls and beer glasses is one place you can find that reality. I think the city bus, with its hot sweaty humanity, its arguing drunks, and moaning children dragging tired parents in their wake, its patient old folk and, most of all, its wild and wonderful, its most celebrated and feared denizens, tucked way up at the back, in their logos and their piercings, its teenagers, is another.

The rhythms of the city are different, the working week, the wild weekend, the constant, and often wearing noise of the traffic, the drumming of rain on windows, the heat of the traffic jam, the thump of a beat. It is the outpouring of a humanity with no other animal or uncontrolled fauna to temper its behaviour. It is a purity in the evolution of our kind that deserves respect and finds it in that most wonderful of 20th century inventions; multiculturalism. That weird and annoyingly utopian idea that we could all get along by celebrating our differences, by revelling in our diversity. It is the identification of people as polymorphous, as part of a variety of communities that criss cross our lives. It fails in so many ways to meet its own standards and sometimes our cityscapes can seem like doomed failures as a result. But the city is the constant, from the Sumerians right through to today the city is the defining feature of our various attempts at civilisation. Of course it only half works, of course it’s confused, they are built by half arsed confused people. I speak in generalisations here, I don’t wish to offend any ancient Sumerians out there who might feel that I’m having a dig. And who am I too judge, maybe their cities were far better managed than ours are today. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. The pint I’m trying to make is that we are imperfect and it follows that our cities will be too. They will be brilliant sometimes, woefully inadequate on other occasions. This is true and we should rail against the inadequacies just as fervently as we praise the brilliance of this or that project. But in my dream of utopia, where, of course, we all really do get along, the city is still very much the beating heart of our communal existence, albeit a cleaner, less aggressive or money oriented city. I love the wide open spaces of the bush, the rolling hills of English countryside, the windswept beauty of rural Ireland, these are magical places, but I was born in the meat factory and that is where I know how to survive the best. I’ve lived in both and I can’t say I prefer one over the other. I love the fact that you get to know people in the country, whether you like it or not! You get to know each others business. If you get drunk one night the town knows about the next day. It can be exasperating but, lets face it, it makes for fantastic social life because it takes in the whole community, old and young, rich and poor are all involved. That said the city communities often get that close, it is far harder to find the city community, they are not there to see, it isn’t so clear cut. A small town is, by definition, a community. A city has a number of communities defined along numerous lines of race, income, occupation and a host of others. These all intersect, there are people that work in one place, live in another and have a hobby that takes them to another place entirely. There is a complex web of communities that support people in the city and when you first move to a city it can be hard to discern them in amongst all the noise and pollution but they’re there. People support each other in the way that they always have, they find ways to side step through the morass of bullshit that is our modern consumer culture to have meaningful and valuable communities. Neighbours talk, colleagues bond, friends introduce friends.

When I moved to Perth I was presented with a choice, or rather, I presented myself with a choice, I could go back to the job I had been doing, in an office, working to earn the money that would give me the security I want for me and my children, or I could be a cycle courier. I’d done it before, ten years ago now, and loved it. I’d been a cycle courier in London and in Brisbane and it had given me an insight into those two cities that I really valued. I’d learnt the streets, the ebb and flow of their traffic, the business of their businesses, the fights and flights of their down trodden, the landmarks, the best parks, the hidden parts. I’d found the cheapest eats, the bargain basement, stick to the wall, rocket fuel coffee that only the couriers and builders (and, in London, the cabbies) know about or need to know about. Finally, and most importantly for me, I could learn about the communities of the city, the cities battlers, its lifers, the ones that live, eat, and drink Perth, the people who live here because here is where they live, not because here is where they work, here is where the money is. I was a little worried, I’ll admit. Here I was, 33 years of age, and effectively starting over in a new place, again! And I was going to throw myself into a job I’d not done in many years. A job that, at its best, is gruellingly physical, that makes tremendous demands of you and pays very little. Was I up to it? More to the point what would my legs think when I started to punish them in that way? But the desire to learn about where I had chosen to call home proved stronger than my fears of being ‘past it’ or too unfit. Off I went to the busiest part of town to see if I could find myself a suitably grungy looking courier to ask about work. In Perth the busiest place is a street called Saint Georges Terrace. I caught the bus into town and hopped off at the Esplanade bus port, walked through the complicated maze of interlinked walkways that connects the bus port with the Terrace and turned right. There was four couriers sitting in the dirty doorway of a disused building. It’s where they hang in the winter months (in the summer they move all of fifteen metres down the road to a small group of benches next door) I spoke to two of them. They gave me the name and number of a company I could approach. I rang them on my mobile minutes later and the next day, two days after setting foot in Perth, I had a job. I went out and bought a bike, a helmet and the, now highly trendy, but still incredibly useful, courier bag and went to work. As jobs go it is pretty simple. I have a radio, I have a bicycle, I have a bag. My radio operator tells me where to go on my radio, I go there on my bike, I pick up a package and put it in my bag, I tell my radio operator what I have done, he then tells me where to go next, hopefully it will entail performing that same action again. The aim is to get as many jobs into your bag as you can because you are paid per job. I then take the jobs to their appropriate addresses trying not to lose or confuse myself enroute. Whilst you’re doing this so is everybody else, so the radio waves are a constant buzz of locations, company names, suburbs and street names, courier numbers and queries. You are on your own all day, you cycle from one place to another as fast as you can, it would be a lonely job were it not for the electronic parrot perched upon your shoulder constantly wittering away. I loved it from day one. Memories of previous courier work came flooding back and I felt alive with the city. I was being paid to ride my bike around the city, how crazy is that! I would say to myself. Cycling around the city did help me get to know it, it helped me get to know it in a way I doubt I ever would have done, or possibly it would have taken years as opposed to months to do so. I also made a great many friends, cycle couriers are always personalities and personality goes a long way with me. Many of them are using it as a stop gap job whilst they work on careers in other areas. There are movie directors, script writers, artists and designers, trainee cops and accountants, travellers who need to stop and refuel their bank account before moving on, there are musicians and metal workers, surfer board makers and printers. And then there are some, quite a few actually, for whom this is the job they love. They love the bike, they love the cycling, they love plotting paths through the city, finding short cuts, taking risks. They are not aiming for celebrity or huge riches, they want to be the best they can at the job. But what ties us all together is the love of the job, the city you do it in, and the of the bicycle as a mode of transport, that and possibly an addiction to the adrenalin or endorphins or whatever it is that is released after cycling like a maniac for 9 hours. So this job has reinvigorated my love of and insight into the common city. It has shown me the best side that the city has to offer, the place where people from all sorts of different backgrounds and walks of life, all sorts of different places can come together and enjoy each others company.

In this tiny, insignificant and low paid job I can find the thing that makes me most proud to be a human being, I can find those hidden communities that are all too often overlooked, be they in city or country. Communities made of people who want only to be able to live their life with as much verve and passion as they are able, to give as much as they can and to hurt as little as is possible. In this place, or that, they are there, all around us, should we care to look. It is in rediscovering these communities, rediscovering the values that they hold dear that we can find a path through the money madness, the egoism and anger of this syndicated individualism.