The paper was soaked in my hand, a soggy rag. I rolled up to the side walk to take shelter from the rain. It was raining hard but hopefully it would not last. I was eager to get on the road but knew from experience that spending a few minutes planning the route can save time later on. I saw Derren and Rebecca there both clutching their wet manifests in their hand as well. At Derrens suggestion we ducked into a laundromat to plan our route. We agreed to attack the city first and then work our way around the northern points after that. It seemed logical at the time. The rain died from a dull roar to a light spatter and we pushed out into the city night. Rebecca’s bike was not built for speed and Derren and I adjusted our speed to account for it. We took the bike path into the city. It was not cold but the rain soaking my arms and legs sent shivers down my spine. The city was heaving with peds and traffic, the buzz of a Friday night. The adrenalin started to pump as we rolled down Murray toward our first location. We scribbled down the sign and rode quickly off. It was thrilling to ride amongst these people. The real thing is still better but as substitutes go the Friday night Alley cat is as good as it gets. You get the traffic, the thrill of the chase and, for a few brief moments, when you’ve warmed up to the task ahead, that Zen moment of cycle messengering, when everything else shuts down, all the noise goes away, and all there is is the cycling, the pedaling, and the traffic. The route you’ve laid out ahead of you and the endless moment as you weave your way through the city traffic.
When I was riding this city for a living it was the drug that dug me out of bed in the mornings, the high I sought with every run and as I learnt the city, over weeks and months it became increasingly harder to find. At first every job would take me somewhere new and thus every job was its own reward. After that every run brought a new way to map the city in my mind, a new way to see the city I lived in. After a while I knew the main routes through the city, I knew a few of the short cuts, a few of the little back alleys and access roads that can shave minutes off a drop. After a while it was the number of jobs I had on, the complexity of the route, the changing nature of that route, rushing east, hiking back up into west, across the tracks and back, 2,3,4 on, more, 5,6,7 on more, more, more! I can get more on, always more. I never wanted to stop, I never wanted to slow down. My goal was to be lost in that moment where every drop off is followed by a pick up or two, or three. I loved it. It wasn’t the speed of the cycling, I am not a fast rider, strong, yes, but not fast, it was the speed of knocking them out. Five minutes per job, four, three if they were locals, more jobs, more money, more riding until 5pm rolled around and you look up, blinking, into the setting sun, wondering where the day has gone.
Like I said an alley cat is a substitute. But we are in the city, three stops down and nine to go. We ride up Beaufort and pull three out quickly. It’s electric now, each point feels like a victory. Alex meets up with us, this alleycat is for him. They call him Quicksilver on account of his apparent similarity to Kevin Bacon. We churn through them but already I am doubting our route. We have William still to do and that runs parralel with Beaufort so we will have to double back on oursleves whichever way we go. We’ve been joined by one more rider and we are loving the ride. The rain comes down again, this time we barely notice. It is hard and fast and the road is slick. I watch Quicksilver bang through a red and disappear past the next check point. It is exciting and the gnawing feeling that we have attacked this all wrong does not spoil that. I think back to Adelaide and the main race there. I fucked that up by going the wrong way too. It is a common mistake. Plenty of riders do it. Riders do it at work too. For some reason I found it easier at work than at play, don’t ask me why, maybe it was the money, always a great motivator, maybe it was the nature of the drop points. Alex skid stops and doubles back as we scribble down the word on the green sticker. I hang back having trouble with my toe clip and afford myself the luxury of belting up Beaufort on the wrong side. The rain against my face and the lights of the oncoming cars energises me and I catch up with the others as we turn left and head toward Lord St. Alex loses us when we slow at a cross roads to regain our group. We ride on toward the check point, four riders, all, unusually, non couriers, although two of us are former couriers.
Courier riding is different to other styles. It is at once faster and slower. Because you are riding for relatively short hops in heavily built up and busy areas you only get up the kind of speeds you would in other cycling disciplines for a short time, if at all. In the daily grind there is as much worth in effective time management off the bike as there is in riding fast. Different people have different ways of approaching it and there are many ways to be an effective courier. I was a steady rider, once my fitness levels were up, I would ride at a reasonably fast pace that pushed me but not excessively so, conscious, as I was, that something had to be kept in reserve. I’d ride with a sense of the full days work rather than from job to job. It may have slowed me down on some stretches but on others it was an advantage. As the afternoon rolled around and the 3pm set runs came up I would always start to push myself that little bit more, partly because it was busy but also because I knew that with only two hours left I could afford to burn the additional energy.
We cross back onto William for the final stretch and that is when I realise just how badly we have screwed up the ride. Starting with the city was all well and good but it meant we rode past two of the first stops on our way in and we now have three stops left two of which are to the south and one of which is to the north. I curse. We split up and two of us head down William street toward Northbridge and two head up into North Perth. It won’t save the race but it is the only way to do it without taking fifteen minutes to double back on ourselves. We ride down William street as fast as we can and head into the busy streets of Northbridge. It is a lot of fun navigating the wet streets and dodging the drunk peds and I quickly forget how badly we have screwed up the race. We ride it out as fast as we can. The last three check points go down fairly quickly and we ride into meet everyone to friendly cheers knowing, by the size of the crowd, that we have not done well.
We came DFL. We screwed it up big time. You win some and you lose some. There are busy days and quiet days. There are days when your legs spend all day waking up and your operator is screaming at you to grab rush jobs from every corner of the city. Days when you have enough energy to pedal forever and yet all you get is city locals. Days when the bike decides to spit every mechanical problem there is at you. And every now and then, every so often, those days when everything is in sync, the work flows, the bike rolls, and the city opens itself up to you in ways that only a scant few have the privilege to really understand. It is something about how we live together, something about how the pieces of this place fit together.. The marriage of man and machine, a physical and emotional understanding of the relationship we have with our technologies. A physical relation with this urban world that affords an understanding of the city environment that many will never be lucky enough to see.
These narratives are vital to our ability to comprehend and cope with our environments. So, in much the same way as a farmer might say of a city dweller, they know nothing of this country life, of the environment, so I would say that none can truly know the city, no one can really understand the urban environment who has not scratched their living from it in one way or another. The existence of the suburban bubble and the bubble that is the office or factory leads to a sort of elimination of that interaction. It denies you your real ability to enjoy the thrill of your world. The city is a thrilling thing, just like the natural world, it is as wild and unpredictable, it is as dangerous and beautiful, and it holds within it, as true a way of life as any and for me riding for a living was a way of accessing that.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
Whycycle?
I remember talking to my friend Benee about cycling, about what it represented to us. It was late at night, after a race and we were drunk, of course, on the cheap beer that we we always drink after a race. I said that for me it represented freedom, that it was the feeling of freedom for me. He told me that he had taken his bike down to watch the sky show on the Esplanade and he had cycled past the rows and rows of cars and he had ridden right up to the foreshore and watched the whole sky show, in all its wonderful glory and then, after the show, had ridden home, past all the people trudging slowly back their cars. And I had known what he meant. I’d gone down there in a car that night, I’d parked a long way away, because I’d had to, because that is how it has to work with the cars, and it was hot and we’d walked for half an hour through the afternoon heat to the Esplanade and the girls had complained because it was hot and the walk was long and then, on the way back I had carried my youngest daughter asleep in my arms. My eldest daughter had been tired too, I had wanted to carry her too, but of course I couldn’t, not over that distance. So I knew what he meant because I’d done the other thing and it is freedom, to ride in, past the parking frenzy, past the esky haulers, the drunk teenagers and their sozzled dramas, past the police and the paramedics and right into the heart of the crowd, right into the middle of where you want to be. It is freedom to turn around, after the last firework has blazed its spectacular path across your retina and jump on your bike and ride through the massed humanity in all its post celebratory glory and ride out through all that while we are trapped in the traffic and the confusion.
That is freedom.
And yes freedom, like that, is a form of individualism. You are not one of the herd, you are free to move when others are trapped, in this case specifically trapped, by their adherence to a cultural norm. But it is more also. The bicycle, with its peculiar reliance on human motivation brings far more than that, it extends your potential, it utilises what you are, physically to move you (and others) from A to B. That is a freedom too. It is a machine, like a car or a computer, a fridge or a factory. But it is a machine that exists on a very human scale and interacts with us on a very human level too. You place your faith and energy in its two wheels and it propels you forward to where you want to go. Of course the tyres may tear or the brakes may wear but essentially this machine will take you where you want to go quickly and efficiently. People used to cross the Nullabor using pedal power, they still do occasionally. Yes it is slow compared with the awesome speed of the motor car, and of course it is physically much harder work for its rider, but therein lies the secret. We are animals, physical shapes cut from the same cloth as all the other animals on this planet, what makes us different is not that we are not the same shape, but what we choose to do with it. And the bicycle is, for me, one of the purest lessons in what to do with who and what we are. It is a machine, a part of how we have changed both ourselves and this planet beyond all recognition, but it is the good part of that. It utilises our energy to propel us forward, to take us where we want to go. It is easy to cycle next to someone who is walking and converse, it is easy to stop and chat, to pause to check somebody is okay, to see if another person is in need of help, and yet it also allows us to move between places far quicker and with far less effort than we would without it. It requires infrastructure in much the same way a car does, roads facilitate ease of use and of course the parts are created using industrial methods. But it is not the same. It is not the same because of the scale of the endeavor, because of the scale of the obsession and because we are open to the world (and therefore more a part of it) rather than hidden away from it. It is easy to stop, to look around, to smell the air, to feel the sun on your back, to cool yourself in the wind. Freedom then becomes freedom not just of movement, or even of being an individual as opposed to part of some mass of humanity or other, it becomes freedom to relate to the world on human terms whilst still retaining some of the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation. And the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation are, of course, the best aspects of who and where we are right now.
So I cycle to work and it’s a fair ride and some days I take the train or the bus or some combination of bike and train, sometimes just to mix it up a little, sometimes because my bikes fucked, or I am, and sometimes I don’t ride because I just plain don’t want to. But when I do ride I love it, when I do ride it is like swimming in the ocean for me. It gives me perspective and allows me to move and think at the same time, which is where the best thinking gets done in my head. I am engaged in the journey physically and that is vital, it is as important as engaging with the world emotionally. If you can engage in a thing you gain an understanding that an intellectual analysis simply cannot give. It is hard, perhaps impossible to describe, but cycling is one of the things I use to help remind myself how important and how easy it is to do that, to interact with the world and to give yourself over to it. So why talk about this? Why talk about this feeling I have? Because I have a bad feeling the current trend seems to be an attempt to disengage as much as possible. Why go out there, amongst all those other people, when you can hide in your little bubble, play your Nintendo, drive your 4WD and plug your MP3 into all the moments in between. And before you say it I love all those things, I love all those things and more. I love the cars and the computers, the mobiles and the malls, I like eating burgers from fast food joints whilst yelling into my mobile phone whilst driving on the free way at 150. It is fun to drive yourself into that bubble, it is spectacular and consuming in the same way that it demands you to consume. I don’t think we need to strip it back to some kind of pre-industrial hell hole. I just think that we need to accept ourselves for what we really are, physical beings, who need physical interaction with world on every level. We need to make that work for us, we need to make sure that we interact with our environment on that basic level as well as others. In the industrialised west it can sometimes be easy to forget how good that can make us feel and that is what cycling reminds me, everyday. Oh and I reckon you feel like you’re going faster if you are on a bike at 50km than if you’re in a car at 150km.
This one is for Benee. Brisbane is lucky to have you my friend.
That is freedom.
And yes freedom, like that, is a form of individualism. You are not one of the herd, you are free to move when others are trapped, in this case specifically trapped, by their adherence to a cultural norm. But it is more also. The bicycle, with its peculiar reliance on human motivation brings far more than that, it extends your potential, it utilises what you are, physically to move you (and others) from A to B. That is a freedom too. It is a machine, like a car or a computer, a fridge or a factory. But it is a machine that exists on a very human scale and interacts with us on a very human level too. You place your faith and energy in its two wheels and it propels you forward to where you want to go. Of course the tyres may tear or the brakes may wear but essentially this machine will take you where you want to go quickly and efficiently. People used to cross the Nullabor using pedal power, they still do occasionally. Yes it is slow compared with the awesome speed of the motor car, and of course it is physically much harder work for its rider, but therein lies the secret. We are animals, physical shapes cut from the same cloth as all the other animals on this planet, what makes us different is not that we are not the same shape, but what we choose to do with it. And the bicycle is, for me, one of the purest lessons in what to do with who and what we are. It is a machine, a part of how we have changed both ourselves and this planet beyond all recognition, but it is the good part of that. It utilises our energy to propel us forward, to take us where we want to go. It is easy to cycle next to someone who is walking and converse, it is easy to stop and chat, to pause to check somebody is okay, to see if another person is in need of help, and yet it also allows us to move between places far quicker and with far less effort than we would without it. It requires infrastructure in much the same way a car does, roads facilitate ease of use and of course the parts are created using industrial methods. But it is not the same. It is not the same because of the scale of the endeavor, because of the scale of the obsession and because we are open to the world (and therefore more a part of it) rather than hidden away from it. It is easy to stop, to look around, to smell the air, to feel the sun on your back, to cool yourself in the wind. Freedom then becomes freedom not just of movement, or even of being an individual as opposed to part of some mass of humanity or other, it becomes freedom to relate to the world on human terms whilst still retaining some of the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation. And the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation are, of course, the best aspects of who and where we are right now.
So I cycle to work and it’s a fair ride and some days I take the train or the bus or some combination of bike and train, sometimes just to mix it up a little, sometimes because my bikes fucked, or I am, and sometimes I don’t ride because I just plain don’t want to. But when I do ride I love it, when I do ride it is like swimming in the ocean for me. It gives me perspective and allows me to move and think at the same time, which is where the best thinking gets done in my head. I am engaged in the journey physically and that is vital, it is as important as engaging with the world emotionally. If you can engage in a thing you gain an understanding that an intellectual analysis simply cannot give. It is hard, perhaps impossible to describe, but cycling is one of the things I use to help remind myself how important and how easy it is to do that, to interact with the world and to give yourself over to it. So why talk about this? Why talk about this feeling I have? Because I have a bad feeling the current trend seems to be an attempt to disengage as much as possible. Why go out there, amongst all those other people, when you can hide in your little bubble, play your Nintendo, drive your 4WD and plug your MP3 into all the moments in between. And before you say it I love all those things, I love all those things and more. I love the cars and the computers, the mobiles and the malls, I like eating burgers from fast food joints whilst yelling into my mobile phone whilst driving on the free way at 150. It is fun to drive yourself into that bubble, it is spectacular and consuming in the same way that it demands you to consume. I don’t think we need to strip it back to some kind of pre-industrial hell hole. I just think that we need to accept ourselves for what we really are, physical beings, who need physical interaction with world on every level. We need to make that work for us, we need to make sure that we interact with our environment on that basic level as well as others. In the industrialised west it can sometimes be easy to forget how good that can make us feel and that is what cycling reminds me, everyday. Oh and I reckon you feel like you’re going faster if you are on a bike at 50km than if you’re in a car at 150km.
This one is for Benee. Brisbane is lucky to have you my friend.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Part 2
William street is a mass of market stalls and people, a few stalls have small solar panels that feed computers and other communication devices. There are food stalls, fruit and vegetable stalls and mods stalls for every kind of device. There is livestock for sale here, small pens of unhealthy looking pigs, cages full of chickens and rabbits. We don’t dismount but the crowds that surround us slow our progress to walking speed. Everything is on sale here, vendors shout their wares above the din of the crowds, and the profusion of goods available coupled with the mass of humanity makes the place look colourful and exciting to me. FC15 pauses to talk to a man selling mods for mobile phones and mini comps. I can’t hear what they’re saying, something changes hands but I don’t see what it is. Later, as we filter out of the street I ask him what it was. “Oh that guy. He’s a mate, a good mate of mine. He knows a bit about blocking and scrambling signals. You’ve got to be able to block or, at the very least, scramble any radio or wireless signal you emit, especially in my line of work. If they get a fix on you it can really ruin your day. I mean they know we’ve got stuff right, but they don’t know where we are. They don’t know what we’re going to do with it. We’re not important enough to really zone in on so a small bounty is put up, nothing really, and any old hunter can take a pot shot. It’s just business really.’ We ride over the horse shoe and back toward the Terrace. I try not to think about the gunship as we cross the tracks. There’s no traffic on the bridge anymore. No cars here at all anymore since the warehouse wars of early 2017. As we ride up William street I look over at the half finished building at the corner of the Murray street mall. The rusty metal framework striking into the air looks like antenna. The whole thing looks like what it is; a broken tribute to a bygone age of optimism and imagination. ‘Went to a ripper of a party there the other day.’ FC15 says noticing me looking at the half finished building. I ask him how he went to a party in an empty shell of a building. ‘Oh that ain’t empty mate there’s people living in there. The tunnel people can get in too, from the old station they put in down there. It’s a nice place, they’ve done it up nice.’ We ride past the mall, past Hay street and right onto Saint Georges Terrace. This is the main drag of the financial district and where my driver had dropped me off barely half an hour ago. It feels like a long time ago now. There’s people here now, a few armoured SUV’s dropping off some workers and a few lower paid workers running from building to building with cleaning equipment and other maintenance gear. We ride up to 250 and down an entry ramp toward the car park. The sound of gunfire and shouting encourages us to put the brakes on. ‘A wrong delivery most likely. Those post rooms are pretty vicious these days. One of our gys was killed a couple of months ago, slipped a slick rick in with a delivery. They scanned it and he was dead before they’d signed for the package. Must have been the money. Some of those companies will offer you a fair whack to smuggle a spy bot into a building like this. It’s worth a fortune to them I guess.’
We cycle back up the ramp away from the mailroom and the sound of gunfire. My wife is getting our children up at around this time, fixing them their breakfast. I try not to think about that. I try not too think about the very real possibility that I might never see them again. FC15 locks our bikes together and electrifies them and we enter in through the main lobby. Almost at once we are surrounded by beefed up security. Before you can say eyelid scan FC15 has a 9mm in his hand, where he produces it from I don’t know. He is calmly explaining that he does not give permission to take a retinal scan and that he has First Courier ID and two packages destined for offices in this building. The security guards do not seem surprised to see the gun. They stand their ground, one pulls out a heavy looking Glok. ‘Let us take an ID off you and we’ll wave the retinal scan. Whose your mate?’
‘Just some journo doing a story, he’s cool. He’s got an ID from his Feed, it checks out okay.’ They scan both our id and wave us through. The lift tags us again as we ride to the fifteenth floor to make the drop. The usual rubbish about retinal scans follows and FC15 politely explains that he is unable to give out this information because of the high risks associated with this being logged onto an intranet no matter how secure they seem to feel it is. The receptionist accepts this argument without qualms and the package is dropped. Next we take the lift down to the eleventh floor. The penultimate package that FC15 picked up from east Perth, although he has bid on and won five pick ups to do on the terrace after dropping this one. The doors open out onto a quiet corridor lined with doors. He motions me to stay in the lift. I do as he says. Each door displays a company name and a logo. FC15 pulls his gun once again. I see that he has a holster sitting beneath his flak jacket. He steps out of the lift looking left and right cautiously as he does so. I can hear nothing. I glance nervously down the corridor, first one way and then the other. ‘What are we looking for?’ I whisper.
‘These floors with different firms on can sometimes be dangerous mate. The offices aren’t protected the same as most so once the door is open it leaves a larger security hole, things can get pretty vicious here’ FC15 says in a low whisper. ‘They are often small offices of larger corps and are slightly easier to target than the larger places. Sometimes they fight amongst themselves too. I remember a few years back a couple of firms at 216 had a gun battle over the use of the toilets. That was well funny. Two people dies and another was taken to hospital over whether or not they left the lid down.’
He looks up and down the corridor and then takes a look at the address for the drop, Unit 101, Radium Resources. He beckons me out and we move down the corridor. As we work our way past the closed doors of each company his pace becomes faster. 97, 98, 99, 100, the last door, facing us, in small black type on the frosted glass the number 101 and just above that Radium Resources. He goes to push the door when I shoot him in the back of the leg. I know he has no armour there, I know he will go down. The silencer deadens the noise but the acrid smell of the explosion still fills my nostrils. He falls against the door pushing it open with a loud yell. I reach into my bag and pull out four tiny spy bots which I release toward the door. They run across his prostate body. Blood seeps from the hole as he writhes around like a stuck pig. I step over him as he finally twists around to face me. I put my foot down on his gun hand and wrench the gun from his hand. He pulls his good knee into my groin as I do so. The pain is enough to knock me backwards, I fall across him, landing on the wounded leg. He lets out another yell. His gun skids across the floor, further into the office. The receptionist in the front office is up and out of her chair. She is calling out something but I don’t hear what. The bots are in the office now, I’ve earnt my commission on this piece of shit fluff piece twenty times over in less than 30 seconds.
‘What the fuck?’ he exclaims. He scrabbles to get out from underneath me. He grimaces as he tries to pull his leg free. I raise the gun but he grabs my wrist and drags it down onto the floor. I hold firm onto the gun as he does this and although he holds firm his other arm cannot get to it without pulling his leg free of me.
‘Oh come on you fucking moron. Bathroom extensions don’t pay for themselves and besides I’ve got mortgage payments to meet.’
‘But you’re a journo. We checked you out.’
‘Everybody has a price 15, you of all people should know that.’ As I say this I hear the alarm go off. I’ve got to kill him before the security guards get to us and he can tell them what has just occurred. I’ve got to get to him before he can tell them the truth. He writhes around so his body is once again facing the floor. He does not let go of my wrist and his grip is like iron. My body is pulled around as he does this. I feel the wetness of his blood seep through my jeans. I punch him as hard as I can in the back of the neck and then I lean into his leg as hard as I can. I can hear him breathing heavily. I figure he will pass out soon. He pulls away from me. He grabs out at the gun lying a metre away from him. Three men run out of the back office, two of them are armed with some kind of gun although they don’t look like the conventional kind, possibly they are tasers.
‘Somebody help me, this guy just released a spy bot into your office.’ I yell at the top of my lungs. The rising panic is real.
‘Screw you buddy.’ FC15 says to me in a low growl and sits up too face me. He pulls his good leg up and kicks me with all he’s got. He connects with my shoulder and I fly back into the door jam, the force of the kick is immense and I hit the metal frame hard enough to pull it from the wall. I find myself staring at the ceiling. I pull the gun up so I can see it. I smile and look for FC15 but he has been busy and is sitting up in a growing pool of his own blood with his 9mm levelled right at me. I sigh and push myself up into a leaning position against the wall just outside the office. The two office workers with weapons level them both at FC15. I smile at him. ‘This guy just released a bot into your office.’ I say. I tried to stop him but only worked out what he was doing a moment before he did it. I think he’s with Uranium’R’Us.’
‘Ok buddy just drop the shooter.’ They say to FC15.
‘I didn’t release no bot mate. This prick gave you four of the fuckers and then shot me in the back of the leg. He’s the dog, not me.’
The two guys look momentarily confused. They glance at one another and then at the receptionist who just shrugs her shoulders.
‘Look guys I’m a journo with the Australian. I’ve got Id to prove it, I live up in Oceanique. I’m true blue mate, why the fuck would I want too give you guys bots? This guy? This guy is a bloody courier, he’s a courier mate. He probably needs the dough for his next hit of Fantasy or some shit.’ I lower my gun to the floor in a gesture of trust.
‘Come on dude this is bullshit. I’ve been in here to pick up and drop off a thousand times, you know me.’ 15 says.
‘Sorry mate I’ve never seen you before in my life. Just hold still and drop the gun now and we’ll let security sort this out.’ One of the office bods says. It’s almost comical how much fear there is in his voice but this pathetic solution is apparently enough for FC15 who lowers his gun.
‘I grin at him and raise mine back up and shoot him in the face. His face seems to implode as the life jumps out of him and something flies out of the back of his head. One of the office guys faints and the other two jump backwards. The receptionist sits down hard on the floor. I hear the lift doors opening and security are yelling at us all to drop our weapons. We all do as they say. They come in and pull the body out of the reception area. Four paramedics come in to check us all out. Turns out he dislocated my shoulder and broke a couple of ribs with the kick. They all buy my story, he was just a courier after all. Three office dudes and a receptionist get the day off and twice weekly visits to the company counsellor for the next six months and I’m $40’000 richer than I was a half hour ago. I pick myself up off the floor with more than a wince. I think about the kids school fees, the mortgage payments, the bathroom extension with the hot tub in it and smile my way down in the lift. In my mind I am finishing off my puff piece for the Sunday supplement with a nice ride off into the sunset for our intrepid adventurer from the wrong side of the tracks. The security guards don’t look at me.
We cycle back up the ramp away from the mailroom and the sound of gunfire. My wife is getting our children up at around this time, fixing them their breakfast. I try not to think about that. I try not too think about the very real possibility that I might never see them again. FC15 locks our bikes together and electrifies them and we enter in through the main lobby. Almost at once we are surrounded by beefed up security. Before you can say eyelid scan FC15 has a 9mm in his hand, where he produces it from I don’t know. He is calmly explaining that he does not give permission to take a retinal scan and that he has First Courier ID and two packages destined for offices in this building. The security guards do not seem surprised to see the gun. They stand their ground, one pulls out a heavy looking Glok. ‘Let us take an ID off you and we’ll wave the retinal scan. Whose your mate?’
‘Just some journo doing a story, he’s cool. He’s got an ID from his Feed, it checks out okay.’ They scan both our id and wave us through. The lift tags us again as we ride to the fifteenth floor to make the drop. The usual rubbish about retinal scans follows and FC15 politely explains that he is unable to give out this information because of the high risks associated with this being logged onto an intranet no matter how secure they seem to feel it is. The receptionist accepts this argument without qualms and the package is dropped. Next we take the lift down to the eleventh floor. The penultimate package that FC15 picked up from east Perth, although he has bid on and won five pick ups to do on the terrace after dropping this one. The doors open out onto a quiet corridor lined with doors. He motions me to stay in the lift. I do as he says. Each door displays a company name and a logo. FC15 pulls his gun once again. I see that he has a holster sitting beneath his flak jacket. He steps out of the lift looking left and right cautiously as he does so. I can hear nothing. I glance nervously down the corridor, first one way and then the other. ‘What are we looking for?’ I whisper.
‘These floors with different firms on can sometimes be dangerous mate. The offices aren’t protected the same as most so once the door is open it leaves a larger security hole, things can get pretty vicious here’ FC15 says in a low whisper. ‘They are often small offices of larger corps and are slightly easier to target than the larger places. Sometimes they fight amongst themselves too. I remember a few years back a couple of firms at 216 had a gun battle over the use of the toilets. That was well funny. Two people dies and another was taken to hospital over whether or not they left the lid down.’
He looks up and down the corridor and then takes a look at the address for the drop, Unit 101, Radium Resources. He beckons me out and we move down the corridor. As we work our way past the closed doors of each company his pace becomes faster. 97, 98, 99, 100, the last door, facing us, in small black type on the frosted glass the number 101 and just above that Radium Resources. He goes to push the door when I shoot him in the back of the leg. I know he has no armour there, I know he will go down. The silencer deadens the noise but the acrid smell of the explosion still fills my nostrils. He falls against the door pushing it open with a loud yell. I reach into my bag and pull out four tiny spy bots which I release toward the door. They run across his prostate body. Blood seeps from the hole as he writhes around like a stuck pig. I step over him as he finally twists around to face me. I put my foot down on his gun hand and wrench the gun from his hand. He pulls his good knee into my groin as I do so. The pain is enough to knock me backwards, I fall across him, landing on the wounded leg. He lets out another yell. His gun skids across the floor, further into the office. The receptionist in the front office is up and out of her chair. She is calling out something but I don’t hear what. The bots are in the office now, I’ve earnt my commission on this piece of shit fluff piece twenty times over in less than 30 seconds.
‘What the fuck?’ he exclaims. He scrabbles to get out from underneath me. He grimaces as he tries to pull his leg free. I raise the gun but he grabs my wrist and drags it down onto the floor. I hold firm onto the gun as he does this and although he holds firm his other arm cannot get to it without pulling his leg free of me.
‘Oh come on you fucking moron. Bathroom extensions don’t pay for themselves and besides I’ve got mortgage payments to meet.’
‘But you’re a journo. We checked you out.’
‘Everybody has a price 15, you of all people should know that.’ As I say this I hear the alarm go off. I’ve got to kill him before the security guards get to us and he can tell them what has just occurred. I’ve got to get to him before he can tell them the truth. He writhes around so his body is once again facing the floor. He does not let go of my wrist and his grip is like iron. My body is pulled around as he does this. I feel the wetness of his blood seep through my jeans. I punch him as hard as I can in the back of the neck and then I lean into his leg as hard as I can. I can hear him breathing heavily. I figure he will pass out soon. He pulls away from me. He grabs out at the gun lying a metre away from him. Three men run out of the back office, two of them are armed with some kind of gun although they don’t look like the conventional kind, possibly they are tasers.
‘Somebody help me, this guy just released a spy bot into your office.’ I yell at the top of my lungs. The rising panic is real.
‘Screw you buddy.’ FC15 says to me in a low growl and sits up too face me. He pulls his good leg up and kicks me with all he’s got. He connects with my shoulder and I fly back into the door jam, the force of the kick is immense and I hit the metal frame hard enough to pull it from the wall. I find myself staring at the ceiling. I pull the gun up so I can see it. I smile and look for FC15 but he has been busy and is sitting up in a growing pool of his own blood with his 9mm levelled right at me. I sigh and push myself up into a leaning position against the wall just outside the office. The two office workers with weapons level them both at FC15. I smile at him. ‘This guy just released a bot into your office.’ I say. I tried to stop him but only worked out what he was doing a moment before he did it. I think he’s with Uranium’R’Us.’
‘Ok buddy just drop the shooter.’ They say to FC15.
‘I didn’t release no bot mate. This prick gave you four of the fuckers and then shot me in the back of the leg. He’s the dog, not me.’
The two guys look momentarily confused. They glance at one another and then at the receptionist who just shrugs her shoulders.
‘Look guys I’m a journo with the Australian. I’ve got Id to prove it, I live up in Oceanique. I’m true blue mate, why the fuck would I want too give you guys bots? This guy? This guy is a bloody courier, he’s a courier mate. He probably needs the dough for his next hit of Fantasy or some shit.’ I lower my gun to the floor in a gesture of trust.
‘Come on dude this is bullshit. I’ve been in here to pick up and drop off a thousand times, you know me.’ 15 says.
‘Sorry mate I’ve never seen you before in my life. Just hold still and drop the gun now and we’ll let security sort this out.’ One of the office bods says. It’s almost comical how much fear there is in his voice but this pathetic solution is apparently enough for FC15 who lowers his gun.
‘I grin at him and raise mine back up and shoot him in the face. His face seems to implode as the life jumps out of him and something flies out of the back of his head. One of the office guys faints and the other two jump backwards. The receptionist sits down hard on the floor. I hear the lift doors opening and security are yelling at us all to drop our weapons. We all do as they say. They come in and pull the body out of the reception area. Four paramedics come in to check us all out. Turns out he dislocated my shoulder and broke a couple of ribs with the kick. They all buy my story, he was just a courier after all. Three office dudes and a receptionist get the day off and twice weekly visits to the company counsellor for the next six months and I’m $40’000 richer than I was a half hour ago. I pick myself up off the floor with more than a wince. I think about the kids school fees, the mortgage payments, the bathroom extension with the hot tub in it and smile my way down in the lift. In my mind I am finishing off my puff piece for the Sunday supplement with a nice ride off into the sunset for our intrepid adventurer from the wrong side of the tracks. The security guards don’t look at me.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
A day in the life of a courier circa 2023...
The Terrace is empty now, for the briefest of moments silence reigns on this battle torn street. Only the wind runs down the canyon created by the skyscrapers. A thin grey light has started to seep in before the sunrise. Sheets of yesterdays newspaper, plastic bags, and a thin trail of heavy black smoke describe the wind with their journey east. The low smouldering burn rises from the wreck of a heavy looking Kona outside 77. A small stain on the cracked pavement just beyond the bikes charred remains shows where the rider was felled. Further down, across the Barrack street intersection two car wrecks, long since burnt out and destroyed, have been dragged into the street. Around one side of them spent shell casings, a broken 700cc wheel set for a road bike, the rear wheel has a scaffolding pole sticking out of it, the front is bent at almost a 90 degree angle. Across the street from the cars is the looming hulk of the old council building, its once proud façade now an empty shell, its shattered and glassless windows staring out bleakly into the early morning like eye sockets in a skull. Beneath this burnt out wreck of a building, below street level, hidden in the hollow emptiness of the car park behind a heavily reinforced steel door is the offices and living quarters of First Couriers, motto; ‘We put your package first … every time’. It’s 4.30am and mobile 15 reaches for his Kevlar vest. It’s the first thing he puts on and, next to his bike, it’s the single most important piece of equipment in his line of work. He lights a small kerosene lamp and slips noiselessly from his bunk and creeps out of the room. He closes the door to the dorm quietly and slips into the mess. He lights a compressed garbage block and throws it into an old wood burning stove, fills a battered old kettle with water from a large open barrel and sets it down on the stove. He pulls the thin skin coloured wire of his radio mike from the back of the Kevlar vest and attaches it to his cheek. Another small wire fits snugly inside his ear. He pulls his uniform on over the top of the vest. He doesn’t switch on yet. He drinks his coffee and warms his hands against the stove. When he is ready he moves down the hall to the bicycle room. He slings his bag over his head and onto his shoulder. He pulls his ride from the rack and checks the tyres and the drive train. Last he puts his helmet and goggles on and clips in. He rides to the door and leans forward to undo four large dead locks. He opens the door and, once on the outside, activates a trip switch to lock them all again.
Outside he switches on and flips the switch on his scrambler. As soon as he switches on the strap of his bag lights up with scrolling text from around twenty different companies and his earpiece becomes a cacophony of sound. Around twenty different voices are repeating jobs over and over again. They talk very fast and although at first it is hard to make any sense of it if you listen for a long enough you start to realise that there is order in this madness. Each voice gets to repeat their list of pick up and drop off zones before the next voice steps in, each list of jobs lasts roughly the same length of time hence the frantic pace at which these operators call them out. Across this rapid fire maze of information cut the couriers, calling their numbers preceded by a short prefix. Mobile 15 announces his presence. ‘FC15, FC15’ he says across the airwaves. There is no pause in the repetition of jobs but his number and presence on the channel is noted. ‘I’m in’ he tells me, ‘ready to work now. Without a location it’s all about what I call on. It’s tricky see because I’ve got to get the work but at the same time I don’t want to reveal too much of my position. Usually I start with a bid on some East work. They can’t tell that I’m not already East so it’s a safe call and for some reason there’s never much competition there in the mornings, especially on the dawn shift.’ We cycle down the Terrace a little way. Three of the buildings, number 20 and number 12 as well as the old Duxton hotel, have seen heavy shelling. The Duxton looks structurally unsound with a gaping hole in the north west corner and large chunks taken out of the façade. Mobile 15 turns and nods to this as we pedal past. ‘That was a conference attack. Japanese carpet fitters I think. It was pretty rough. I can’t believe they chose to stay there, they must have been nuts! I had to get two of their life cards out. It was that big outfit from over East that attacked. They were good, some of their own crew and some hired guys. Had a tank and all sorts. Those warehouse carpet guys with all the last minute sales, you must have heard of ‘em. Jeez mate they were vicious’. We move on past the Duxton and down into Adelaide Terrace. Two buildings here have seen so much action that they are no longer there, just the odd wall and pillar jutting out of the scorched earth. Outside 197-201 Adelaide Terrace the dark stain of blood and the shattered windows attest to a gun battle of some kind. The windows of level one are blown out and a desk leans out of the window at a precarious angle. I hear FC15 call for a series of jobs. He turns round to look at me and nods to his left before accelerating up Bennet Street. I stand on the pedals and push hard to keep up. We ride up and over the brow of a slight hill and down toward Royal street. He throws his bike around the wreck of an SUV and into 130 Royal. He leans against the wall in the entrance way and buzzes up. Two cameras swivel around to look at us. ‘Don’t look at them.’ FC15 tells me. I do as he says. He looks up. ‘The goggles prevent retinal scan so I’m safe. Hackers sometimes get into the security systems of these places and they can id you from a scan and then you’re screwed.’ The door slides open and we roll slowly in and dismount. The lift id’s us and FC15 shows them his bag. The information on the strap rearranges itself briefly to allow the lift to id us. We ride up into the office of an architects on level one. ‘It’s these pick ups I like. Smaller offices, not so much danger. Less likely to get hit up for a roll of plans than for some legal documents bound for some big corp, know what I mean?’ I nod dumbly. I don’t know what he means, how could I? FC15 and scores of others like him exist in a world fraught with danger at every turn. For many of us the gated communities, the armoured SUV’s and the closed networks that surround our daily lives make life in this brave new world of the free market manageable and safe but information still needs to cross corporate lines, communication still needs to run between the warring factions. So while Suncorp might take out a factory in Malaysia in a bid to hit at a competitors share price or its bottom line it may well be locked in a legal battle with that same company, or, bizarrely, may be financing its next mall development or product line. It’s a topsy turvy world we live in and FC15 is caught smack bang in the middle of it all running messages and data across town.
We walk into a large reception area and on a small table are two rolls of plans. The receptionist asks us for thumb prints. FC15 declines politely. ‘Sorry only company id. You know the rules. I’m nobody but I’m registered to First and that’s gold.’ He places the plans in an expandable tube and puts it in his bag. He scans the barcode on the line pad and leaves. The receptionist isn’t fased it’s all part of the game theey play. She has to ask for thumb prints from every single person that walks through the doors and, in this day and age, when identity is everything, everybody has to refuse. Roll out onto the street and make five other pick ups along Royal street before heading over to Fielder street for a pick up from one of those new places that look like a couple of sea containers stacked one on top of the other. It’s bomb proof and windowless and the package comes to us from a small hole at the base of the building. He registers this last one picked up and indicates his intension to cross on the walk way that runs across the freeway and railway tracks. We ride up the gentle incline of the ramp and onto the walkway before I hear it. The freeway is starting to fill with vehicles. The rush hour is coming and the noise from the road drowns out the low whump whump whump of the helicopter. FC15 hears it and turns around to me. ‘Ride, ride now.’ He says before standing up, out of his saddle and throwing the bike forward as fast as he can. I hear it then and from behind the hulk of the old power station I see it too. A gunship peels round and turns to fly low along the freeway toward us. I rush to keep up with FC15 but he is leaving me behind. I feel a sense of panic rising. I see a flash of orange and red come from the gunship and a trail of light coloured smoke speed toward us, I hear the hiss of the missile as it speeds toward us. We’re half way along the over pass now. The covered area obscures our view of the gunship. Behind me, but only just, I hear the missile crunch into the over pass and feel the spray of broken concrete on my back. My heart jumps into my mouth and my stomach twists itself around my lower intestine. I want to be sick and empty my bowels in one fluid motion, instead I cycle as hard as I can toward FC15. I clear the covered area just as another missile hits. This one destroys the metal roof and the sound of metal twisting and shattering is added to the crunch of exploding concrete. FC15 is near the point at which it becomes a down ramp. He spins the bike around underneath him to face me. I am cycling as hard as I can, I shift down into the hardest gear to try and gain more speed. The gunship passes underneath me. I feel the air whir violently around me. It circles around as I catch up to FC15. ‘Come on mate, you’re doing well. We’ve got a couple of seconds before he can get us back in his sights now.’ He shouts to me encouragingly. I try not think about those fragile seconds and stare at my front wheel as I push as hard as I can into the pedals. FC15 waits until I am nearly up with him and then uses the ramp to gain speed quickly. We shoot off the end of the ramp quickly. He loses us in the small roads before Lord street. My heart is pumping like mad. I can’t tell whether it is fear or excitement. I feel as though I haven’t slept in a month and I’ve done about a pound of Crank. The gunship gives up almost instantly. ‘Bounty hunters. They won’t spend long looking, not worth it. They’re on a free call system just like us. They’ll pick up another target soon enough. On an open area like that walkway we’re a target but down here we’re pretty safe from those guys. Snipers is what we wanna watch for here but they’re pretty rare nowadays. No money in it now.’ We make a slight detour to a drop on Money street, two packages get dropped there. It’s pretty quick, there’s a drop slot on the outside of the building and the id is registered by remote. We ride on through the battle scarred financial district of east Perth, past the crater that was the soccer stadium and into Northbridge.
to be continued....
This one is fo 18 Terry. That's some bad hat!
Outside he switches on and flips the switch on his scrambler. As soon as he switches on the strap of his bag lights up with scrolling text from around twenty different companies and his earpiece becomes a cacophony of sound. Around twenty different voices are repeating jobs over and over again. They talk very fast and although at first it is hard to make any sense of it if you listen for a long enough you start to realise that there is order in this madness. Each voice gets to repeat their list of pick up and drop off zones before the next voice steps in, each list of jobs lasts roughly the same length of time hence the frantic pace at which these operators call them out. Across this rapid fire maze of information cut the couriers, calling their numbers preceded by a short prefix. Mobile 15 announces his presence. ‘FC15, FC15’ he says across the airwaves. There is no pause in the repetition of jobs but his number and presence on the channel is noted. ‘I’m in’ he tells me, ‘ready to work now. Without a location it’s all about what I call on. It’s tricky see because I’ve got to get the work but at the same time I don’t want to reveal too much of my position. Usually I start with a bid on some East work. They can’t tell that I’m not already East so it’s a safe call and for some reason there’s never much competition there in the mornings, especially on the dawn shift.’ We cycle down the Terrace a little way. Three of the buildings, number 20 and number 12 as well as the old Duxton hotel, have seen heavy shelling. The Duxton looks structurally unsound with a gaping hole in the north west corner and large chunks taken out of the façade. Mobile 15 turns and nods to this as we pedal past. ‘That was a conference attack. Japanese carpet fitters I think. It was pretty rough. I can’t believe they chose to stay there, they must have been nuts! I had to get two of their life cards out. It was that big outfit from over East that attacked. They were good, some of their own crew and some hired guys. Had a tank and all sorts. Those warehouse carpet guys with all the last minute sales, you must have heard of ‘em. Jeez mate they were vicious’. We move on past the Duxton and down into Adelaide Terrace. Two buildings here have seen so much action that they are no longer there, just the odd wall and pillar jutting out of the scorched earth. Outside 197-201 Adelaide Terrace the dark stain of blood and the shattered windows attest to a gun battle of some kind. The windows of level one are blown out and a desk leans out of the window at a precarious angle. I hear FC15 call for a series of jobs. He turns round to look at me and nods to his left before accelerating up Bennet Street. I stand on the pedals and push hard to keep up. We ride up and over the brow of a slight hill and down toward Royal street. He throws his bike around the wreck of an SUV and into 130 Royal. He leans against the wall in the entrance way and buzzes up. Two cameras swivel around to look at us. ‘Don’t look at them.’ FC15 tells me. I do as he says. He looks up. ‘The goggles prevent retinal scan so I’m safe. Hackers sometimes get into the security systems of these places and they can id you from a scan and then you’re screwed.’ The door slides open and we roll slowly in and dismount. The lift id’s us and FC15 shows them his bag. The information on the strap rearranges itself briefly to allow the lift to id us. We ride up into the office of an architects on level one. ‘It’s these pick ups I like. Smaller offices, not so much danger. Less likely to get hit up for a roll of plans than for some legal documents bound for some big corp, know what I mean?’ I nod dumbly. I don’t know what he means, how could I? FC15 and scores of others like him exist in a world fraught with danger at every turn. For many of us the gated communities, the armoured SUV’s and the closed networks that surround our daily lives make life in this brave new world of the free market manageable and safe but information still needs to cross corporate lines, communication still needs to run between the warring factions. So while Suncorp might take out a factory in Malaysia in a bid to hit at a competitors share price or its bottom line it may well be locked in a legal battle with that same company, or, bizarrely, may be financing its next mall development or product line. It’s a topsy turvy world we live in and FC15 is caught smack bang in the middle of it all running messages and data across town.
We walk into a large reception area and on a small table are two rolls of plans. The receptionist asks us for thumb prints. FC15 declines politely. ‘Sorry only company id. You know the rules. I’m nobody but I’m registered to First and that’s gold.’ He places the plans in an expandable tube and puts it in his bag. He scans the barcode on the line pad and leaves. The receptionist isn’t fased it’s all part of the game theey play. She has to ask for thumb prints from every single person that walks through the doors and, in this day and age, when identity is everything, everybody has to refuse. Roll out onto the street and make five other pick ups along Royal street before heading over to Fielder street for a pick up from one of those new places that look like a couple of sea containers stacked one on top of the other. It’s bomb proof and windowless and the package comes to us from a small hole at the base of the building. He registers this last one picked up and indicates his intension to cross on the walk way that runs across the freeway and railway tracks. We ride up the gentle incline of the ramp and onto the walkway before I hear it. The freeway is starting to fill with vehicles. The rush hour is coming and the noise from the road drowns out the low whump whump whump of the helicopter. FC15 hears it and turns around to me. ‘Ride, ride now.’ He says before standing up, out of his saddle and throwing the bike forward as fast as he can. I hear it then and from behind the hulk of the old power station I see it too. A gunship peels round and turns to fly low along the freeway toward us. I rush to keep up with FC15 but he is leaving me behind. I feel a sense of panic rising. I see a flash of orange and red come from the gunship and a trail of light coloured smoke speed toward us, I hear the hiss of the missile as it speeds toward us. We’re half way along the over pass now. The covered area obscures our view of the gunship. Behind me, but only just, I hear the missile crunch into the over pass and feel the spray of broken concrete on my back. My heart jumps into my mouth and my stomach twists itself around my lower intestine. I want to be sick and empty my bowels in one fluid motion, instead I cycle as hard as I can toward FC15. I clear the covered area just as another missile hits. This one destroys the metal roof and the sound of metal twisting and shattering is added to the crunch of exploding concrete. FC15 is near the point at which it becomes a down ramp. He spins the bike around underneath him to face me. I am cycling as hard as I can, I shift down into the hardest gear to try and gain more speed. The gunship passes underneath me. I feel the air whir violently around me. It circles around as I catch up to FC15. ‘Come on mate, you’re doing well. We’ve got a couple of seconds before he can get us back in his sights now.’ He shouts to me encouragingly. I try not think about those fragile seconds and stare at my front wheel as I push as hard as I can into the pedals. FC15 waits until I am nearly up with him and then uses the ramp to gain speed quickly. We shoot off the end of the ramp quickly. He loses us in the small roads before Lord street. My heart is pumping like mad. I can’t tell whether it is fear or excitement. I feel as though I haven’t slept in a month and I’ve done about a pound of Crank. The gunship gives up almost instantly. ‘Bounty hunters. They won’t spend long looking, not worth it. They’re on a free call system just like us. They’ll pick up another target soon enough. On an open area like that walkway we’re a target but down here we’re pretty safe from those guys. Snipers is what we wanna watch for here but they’re pretty rare nowadays. No money in it now.’ We make a slight detour to a drop on Money street, two packages get dropped there. It’s pretty quick, there’s a drop slot on the outside of the building and the id is registered by remote. We ride on through the battle scarred financial district of east Perth, past the crater that was the soccer stadium and into Northbridge.
to be continued....
This one is fo 18 Terry. That's some bad hat!
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The Rum Riders
The early settlers relied on convict labour to supply them with their cycle couriers. There were 15 cycle couriers in 1815 when they were first introduced. This number stayed steady until 1827 when a further 17 convicts were put to work in this fashion. Records show that although numbers stayed the same individual riders were changed frequently, probably as a result of the gruelling nature of the work and the harsh punishments metered out for offences that were often unavoidable. Both men and women were put too work in this fashion with as many as one hundred different convicts working as cycle couriers in any given year. The work was hard with heavy loads carried between many of the settler’s farmsteads as well as mail and smaller fare for Government officials and the like. By 1827, when the number of couriers was doubled, the work that they performed was of such importance to the fledgling colony that the Governor took to doubling the rum ration and the meat allowance of those convicts who achieved certain targets. Those that attained these targets (usually handed out on a job by job basis) became known as the ‘Rum Riders’ as they were frequently seen after their work had been completed riding about the settlement drunk on their additional ration of rum and full of rowdy energy. These ‘rum riders’ formed a core of couriers who had stayed in the job longer than others and had achieved a certain notoriety as a result. A particularly long serving group of Rum Riders actually formed a small cabal in the winter of 1834 and plotted to overthrow the Governor of the day and install a Jacobin style democracy in the fledgling settlement. The rebellion was defeated at a very early stage however when one of the band turned them over to the Governors men for additional rations. All the men were arrested and tried by a military tribunal. Six of the riders hung for their crimes. Three were sent to Rottnest and later died building the wharf. Only two survived and though they lived they were never able to ride again as the injuries they had received were too severe.
The life was hard, the bicycles were primitive by modern standards, usually on a fixed wheel with no brakes, there was rarely even a basket to place the goods in and so most of the couriers would construct bags from old flour sacks. A good bag was a much prized item as a lot of effort went into trying to make the bags waterproof and as hard wearing as possible as packages and mail that arrived damp or in poor condition frequently brought the rider a flogging. Flogging was common for the riders with punishment for tardiness, recklessness, wet goods, goods that had dried in the sun, goods that had not been given adequate packing in the sacks. It was not uncommon for a rider to be flogged three times in a day for offences of this nature. Riders were sent from the centre of the settlement to any and all destinations. It is hard to estimate just how far a rider would ride in any given day but the farmsteads were spread out and many riders would spend an entire day riding through the bush with a sack of mail and goods on his or her back just to drop it off with one farmer and they would then return to the settlement. If they returned late they would be flogged, usually nightfall was the cut off point but for the farmsteads that lay further out the farmer would often put them up overnight and they would return the following day. Attacks by local Aboriginals were not uncommon and a good few riders were killed or injured in this way. As the convict supply dwindled and their need in construction and farming increased the use of Aboriginal labour for cycle courier increased. These mixed groups of cycle couriers are amongst the first in Australia. Although there was often harsh divides between the convicts and the Aboriginals there was also some camaraderie and friendship between them also. In fact four of the Rum Riders involved in the plot to overthrow the Governor were Aboriginal and a later attempt at forming a courier union was lead by a mixed race man called Tobias Jones. The following extract from a letter to England shows the harsh conditions under which the Swan River settlements early bicycle messengers worked:
“Cycling in leg irons is a most difficult and indeed tiresome affair but, once mastered, can bring certain rewards. The Governor will increase the Rum ration of any man, or woman (for here they will even put the women to work in this manner), who can complete three score or more jobs per day or ride for more than forty miles across this harsh country. He has also been known to offer double the meat rations to those riders whom he deems to be of the hardest metal. I have taken to riding in a fashion that is both fast and feckless with little regard for my person nor those around me as this is the only way to ensure that I transfer the goods in manner to which the Governor and all his men insist. I fear the floggings that result from a late delivery and I cannot deny that the additional rum is most welcome. The shouts of anger and annoyance as we rattle past on our way to the court or the Governors house or some homestead or other serve only to sharpen our determination and many of us have developed a wit to match their anger. For we are the lowest of the convicts in many free peoples eyes, too rough for even farm hands, too simple for clerical work and too light fingered for the stores and docks we rank at the bottom of the convict ladder, below even the lowliest farm hand. It is, dear sister, far from the truth of the matter, despite what you may hear, and we riders are not only as fine a band of men and women as you would find anywhere on this Earth but we are also from many walks of life. I myself was once a printers letter maker, a member of the printers guild and were it not for the crime of printing union letters I would still be so. Jack, one of the finest riders here, was a tanner from Oxford way and has fashioned a bag from Roo skin that is the envy of us all. There is even a native rider, who stood accused of murdering a sergeant in the dead of night (although we all know the sergeant was of ill temper and a fiend for the rum with a powerful temper) and earned himself a set of irons and a life in the saddle along with the rest of us. Two of the riders hail from Ireland and their only crime was to try and feed their starving children whilst their landlords took all that they saw for themselves.
After the day is done we gather around a fire and tell stories of the lives we had and the lives we now lead. We are comrade’s dearest sister and stand together, riders one and all. Who would have thought that we could sail to the ends of the Earth and that the same things that stood true in the bowels of darkest London would stand true here, but tis as true now as when I first laid eyes on the works of Thomas Paine; “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” So my leg irons keep me in bondage to my English masters but I ride with men and women who share my vision of freedom and fraternity for all and whose every waking hour is spent pushing the limits of what their endurance will bear. It is that dearness for my fellow man that keeps my heart and soul free whilst my legs are in chains.”
For 24 the crack whore. Yes I’m reading and romanticizing ‘The Fatal Shore’ brother! If your gonna write fiction it might as well be fiction!!
The life was hard, the bicycles were primitive by modern standards, usually on a fixed wheel with no brakes, there was rarely even a basket to place the goods in and so most of the couriers would construct bags from old flour sacks. A good bag was a much prized item as a lot of effort went into trying to make the bags waterproof and as hard wearing as possible as packages and mail that arrived damp or in poor condition frequently brought the rider a flogging. Flogging was common for the riders with punishment for tardiness, recklessness, wet goods, goods that had dried in the sun, goods that had not been given adequate packing in the sacks. It was not uncommon for a rider to be flogged three times in a day for offences of this nature. Riders were sent from the centre of the settlement to any and all destinations. It is hard to estimate just how far a rider would ride in any given day but the farmsteads were spread out and many riders would spend an entire day riding through the bush with a sack of mail and goods on his or her back just to drop it off with one farmer and they would then return to the settlement. If they returned late they would be flogged, usually nightfall was the cut off point but for the farmsteads that lay further out the farmer would often put them up overnight and they would return the following day. Attacks by local Aboriginals were not uncommon and a good few riders were killed or injured in this way. As the convict supply dwindled and their need in construction and farming increased the use of Aboriginal labour for cycle courier increased. These mixed groups of cycle couriers are amongst the first in Australia. Although there was often harsh divides between the convicts and the Aboriginals there was also some camaraderie and friendship between them also. In fact four of the Rum Riders involved in the plot to overthrow the Governor were Aboriginal and a later attempt at forming a courier union was lead by a mixed race man called Tobias Jones. The following extract from a letter to England shows the harsh conditions under which the Swan River settlements early bicycle messengers worked:
“Cycling in leg irons is a most difficult and indeed tiresome affair but, once mastered, can bring certain rewards. The Governor will increase the Rum ration of any man, or woman (for here they will even put the women to work in this manner), who can complete three score or more jobs per day or ride for more than forty miles across this harsh country. He has also been known to offer double the meat rations to those riders whom he deems to be of the hardest metal. I have taken to riding in a fashion that is both fast and feckless with little regard for my person nor those around me as this is the only way to ensure that I transfer the goods in manner to which the Governor and all his men insist. I fear the floggings that result from a late delivery and I cannot deny that the additional rum is most welcome. The shouts of anger and annoyance as we rattle past on our way to the court or the Governors house or some homestead or other serve only to sharpen our determination and many of us have developed a wit to match their anger. For we are the lowest of the convicts in many free peoples eyes, too rough for even farm hands, too simple for clerical work and too light fingered for the stores and docks we rank at the bottom of the convict ladder, below even the lowliest farm hand. It is, dear sister, far from the truth of the matter, despite what you may hear, and we riders are not only as fine a band of men and women as you would find anywhere on this Earth but we are also from many walks of life. I myself was once a printers letter maker, a member of the printers guild and were it not for the crime of printing union letters I would still be so. Jack, one of the finest riders here, was a tanner from Oxford way and has fashioned a bag from Roo skin that is the envy of us all. There is even a native rider, who stood accused of murdering a sergeant in the dead of night (although we all know the sergeant was of ill temper and a fiend for the rum with a powerful temper) and earned himself a set of irons and a life in the saddle along with the rest of us. Two of the riders hail from Ireland and their only crime was to try and feed their starving children whilst their landlords took all that they saw for themselves.
After the day is done we gather around a fire and tell stories of the lives we had and the lives we now lead. We are comrade’s dearest sister and stand together, riders one and all. Who would have thought that we could sail to the ends of the Earth and that the same things that stood true in the bowels of darkest London would stand true here, but tis as true now as when I first laid eyes on the works of Thomas Paine; “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” So my leg irons keep me in bondage to my English masters but I ride with men and women who share my vision of freedom and fraternity for all and whose every waking hour is spent pushing the limits of what their endurance will bear. It is that dearness for my fellow man that keeps my heart and soul free whilst my legs are in chains.”
For 24 the crack whore. Yes I’m reading and romanticizing ‘The Fatal Shore’ brother! If your gonna write fiction it might as well be fiction!!
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