Sitting in my room and watching 60 minutes with the lead story on the booming times in the mines of Western Australia you realize that you are part of something big. The SMS messages fly around the boys to make sure that we all have a story to look at our industry that we are all part of. An industry that none of us ever thought we would be concerned if your clock back fours years to rewind to our college days. A sector which according to the 60 minutes in a $ 1,000 per second industry and continues “the best times have always existed.” We look at the story and see that we work on drilling rigs, dump trucks that the sample Cat still amaze us with their size every time we see them, the ‘local’ we drink and we realize it is a good time to a young kiwi working in the mines of Western Australia who have difficulty keeping up with demand from a booming China.
I am one of literally thousands of Kiwis who are currently located in and around Kalgoorlie, 700 km east of Perth in Western Australia Goldfields. I am here for three and half month in what was originally going to 100 days a challenge that I myself have asked. I was based in Wellington and became frustrated with the lack of job opportunities and the amount of money I had offered. I was introduced to the idea of working here with a friend from school who, together with four of his college friends had spent six months here last year. They came back and I decided this was the way to quickly get some money together to start my OE. The general consensus back home that you need $ 10,000 for this to start your OE if you can save $ 200 one week, this one year. I had told you that amount to save in three months here so I thought why not. A couple of other friends in Sydney had also decided to make the leap of faith and this further helped ease my fears. I have my job, booked a flight and my bags full of blind optimism that everything would be fine. Having never done a hard days work in my life and not too many practical skills behind me I knew I was in for a testing time, but I thought that if my grandfather can go to war for five years as a young man, I can manage 100 days in the mines.
Arriving in Kambalda, 50 km south of Kalgoorlie everthing went smoothly. I arrived late on a Sunday, went to the yard on a Monday morning to apply for a job, had a medical and signed a million forms that afternoon, the necessary my site inductions closed on Tuesday and Wednesday and was out working on a drill on the Thursday. How life was so dramatically changed in the space of one week. With the Easter holidays three weeks later I had just one day and finished 78 hours a week in the process. I barely had time to take it all in. I was lucky in the fact that when I started five friends had been here and within one month the number had swelled to 13. So here we were 13 boys from NZ all connected together through school or university to work for the same exploration company, staying in the same camp and all those long, hard hours.
Everyone has their own reason to be here, but the underlying fact is that money talks and we are in, we have to save money easily done. We are saving between $ 900 and $ 1300 a week as all food and accommodation is paid for by our company at the cost of $ 70 per night per head.
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