The Golden Land by Di Morrissey Page B

shouting, whistles, machinery, trucks, trains hauling coal. It’s full-on madness. And people are working round the clock, working under lights, twenty-four seven. There’s constant pressure. When I have time off I stick to my room to get a bit of peace and quiet.’
    â€˜It sounds awful.’
    â€˜It’s better than it used to be, I hear. The first workers on the site lived really rough. Now there are sealed roads, a rec centre with a pool and a club social room and a big dining hall with really good meals. Even landscaped gardens! It’s a plush camp in the middle of nowhere.’
    â€˜What about the people you work with? Have you made friends? Hung out together after work? Are you working with the same people all the time?’
    â€˜Not really, said Mark, ‘I work with different people a lot because I move around to different jobs. Everyone has different rosters, too, and they seem to come and go, quit and move on, very regularly. Most don’t see it as a longterm job. Like me, they’re in it for the money. Hanging out! I’m too buggered to socialise. Twelve-hour days are pretty full-on, takes its toll.’
    â€˜I’m trying to imagine it. Can you take some photos?’
    â€˜We’ll see.’
    In the beginning Natalie had missed Mark terribly. When he came home she changed her routine to fit in with him. Because he slept late for the first couple of days, she kept the kids home from their preschool so that he could spend time with them when he woke up. She appreciated taking time-out for herself, even if it was just for a doctor’s appointment or grocery shopping in peace without the kids, or getting the car serviced. And she delighted in the four of them spending time together, going to the beach for a swim or packing a picnic lunch and finding a park with lots of things for the children to play on.
    As time went by, Natalie found that she adjusted to Mark’s long absences. She liked not having to prepare elaborate meals, especially when it was so hard to cook in their kitchen. Eating an egg and a piece of fruit with the children was much easier, and she found that having only herself to please could make life very simple. While Mark was away, she took over those jobs that he had usually done, including mowing the grass in the front of the house and, while it added to her workload, Natalie felt a small twinge of pride in managing everything. At night, when she was on her own and the children were asleep, she refined her plans for the renovations. The more she lived in her house, the more she loved it. She wasn’t bothering to watch TV of an evening but instead listened to her iPod as she made sketches, took measurements and flipped through country-inspired decorating magazines.
    The kitchen was not just going to be replaced. She wanted to enlarge it by knocking out the wall between it and the laundry. And what had been a small office at the end of the hall, opening onto the side garden, she would turn into a new laundry with a fold-down clothesline on the outside wall facing the morning sun. The fourth and fifth bedrooms, which were fairly big but dark and depressing, she planned to make into one big play area for the kids, with one of the walls to be replaced with folding plantation doors. These would open onto the sheltered and fenced front garden, which she would plant with tropical flowers, or maybe herb beds, and perhaps construct a sandpit there, as well.
    She planned to throw white paint over all the dark rooms with their old stained-wood panelling, which Mark had said was only wood veneer anyway. She’d decided to go with a colour scheme of white and indigo blue with splashes of yellow. Fresh, clean, cool.
    She’d get Mark to slash back some of the rampant tropical growth that shaded so much of the garden and verandah and harboured, as she’d discovered, hordes of mosquitoes. The length of scrubby grass that stretched from their fence