Low Life | 9 May 2009

I met Digger 30 years ago in a plastics factory. We put in 12-hour shifts on adjacent injection moulding machines, which is a good way to get to know somebody, and we knocked about together after work, mainly in pubs, for a year or so, and then I went away and we lost contact. Six weeks ago he sent me an email. He’d recently taught himself computer skills and gone online and he’s getting in touch with all his old English buddies, he said. He was living in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, working for a mining company. He takes geologists into the outback, sets up their camps and generally looks after them, and when they’ve finished examining the rocks, he conducts them safely back to civilisation. When you get them around a campfire with a beer in their hand, geologists can be very interesting people, he says. This is his first salaried job after a lifetime of tree surgery and tobacco picking.