The Hindu Business Line : Where the streets are deserted during `rush hour'

You get the feeling that you are travelling to a different country while flying from Canberra on the east coast to Perth, Western Australia. Not only do you fly four long hours but you also have to set your watch back by three hours as Western Australia is in a different time zone.

The state of Western Australia is three-fourths the size of India but has a population of just 2 million, about the same as Patna or Indore! And 1.5 million of those people live in the capital city, Perth.

Yet, you miss the teeming crowds during rush hour that is normally expected in a big city; indeed, walking down the streets of the business district even during the early evening hours can be scary for those who are used to people all around as the streets are deserted. This holds true for Canberra as well; the capital city just seems to shut down by dusk with hardly a soul on the roads.

Unlike in India, few people seem to sit late at work and this is especially true for the weekends. The Aussies obviously treasure their personal time.

We had the embarrassment of being subtly reminded about shooting past the allotted time at an appointment on a Friday evening. "Gentlemen, are you sure you are not running late for your next appointment", our host in a government agency at Perth asked us ever so gently. We looked at our watches to discover it was 4.40 p.m. — we had swallowed ten minutes of the weekend time of our gracious hosts!

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Staying on the subject of how the Aussies strike a good balance between work and play, the last day of our trip, November 7, was the day of the Melbourne Cup horse race. The Cup race is held on the first Tuesday of November each year — a day when the whole of Australia shuts down. Literally! It is party time as those lucky to be in Melbourne head for the Flemington Race Course, while the others park themselves before large-sized screens at pubs or gather with their friends at home for the live telecast. The Race is a major commercial event and the main sponsor this year was Emirates, but there were 63 other high profile sponsors ranging from Cadbury's to Longines, Motorola, L'Oreal and even Lexus. Such is the following the Race commands in Australia.

Our appointment with a Minister in the Western Australian Government at Perth that morning was advanced to 8 a.m. no doubt as much to help us join the fun as to enable the Minister himself watch the race! Incidentally, the Melbourne Cup also marks an important date in the countdown to Christmas. The day after the Cup, Christmas celebrations officially begin across the country. Sadly, we were on the plane back to India that day!

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York is a small town, nay overgrown village, about 100 km east of Perth towards the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie. That is where we spent a weekend in the quaint, old-worldly farmhouse of Wendy and Ken Solly. The elderly and kind Wendy and Ken run a bed-and-breakfast in their farmhouse which boasts of a vineyard, a pond, a few sheep, a couple of cute South American alapacas, Jessie and Oscar, their pet kangaroos, and a number of ducks and hens.

The Hope Farm, as it is known, is set about 3 km from main York in secluded surroundings. "Don't you feel lonely to live out here," we ask Ken who appears surprised. "Aw", he says in the typical Aussie drawl, "We are used to large spaces. We used to own an 8,500-acre wheat farm in the hinterland with 6,000 heads of cattle. This place is a little small for us," he says, despite living in a farm that must be five acres big! Wendy and Ken had to sell their land as they were getting old and found it difficult to manage the show. The nearest hospital and bank, Ken says, was 96 km from their farm but they had a good neighbourhood community going of similar big farmers. We spent a memorable weekend at the Hope Farm including an evening in their quaint antique laden wood-floored living room chatting by the fireplace. You can visit them on the Web at http://www.yorkwa.com.au/hopefarm/

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The Qantas flight from Perth to Karratha in the northwest of Australia, we assumed, would be a small turbo-prop aircraft with a handful of passengers, including poor us, travelling to the back of the beyond. But surprises of surprises, it was a Boeing 737-800 aircraft and packed with big, tough looking miners and oilmen. The north-west of Australia is the oil and gas hub and boasts of several prominent gas fields including the North-west Shelf (NWS) venture operated by Woodside Petroleum along with five other big companies such as ChevronTexaco, Shell and BP.

Karratha, which is the landfall point for the NWS gas, is a satellite town of the much older Dampier, built in 1967 to ship iron ore brought in from BHP's mines 400 km hinterland. Karratha is today a packed town with scarce housing.

Our host from Woodside Energy says that rents range from A$600 to A$800 a week and it is tough to get a house even for that price. All this is thanks to the boom caused by the NWS venture which, consequently, has had to rely on a fly-in-fly-out workforce from Perth and indeed, other parts of Australia.

Workers fly in for two-week shifts and fly out to their homes to rest for the next two weeks. Karratha, which is also the base for Burrup Fertilisers, promoted by the Oswals from India, is a dry, barren piece of land that was home to a prominent aboriginal tribe.

There are still rock drawings you can spot here that date back to several thousands of years. Incidentally, Karratha is home to about 17 Indian families working in Burrup Fertilisers and we found chicken tikka and beef vindaloo amongst the menu in a local pub pointing to the popularity of Indian cuisine.

(Concluded)