melissadrummond

This weekend is the 25^th anniversary of my arrival in Kalgoorlie.

In July 1998, I packed up my 1979 Land Cruiser with all my important possessions and travelled across to Adelaide with a couple of friends to spend a weekend partying. It was an odd time, tinged with sadness. We got tattoos to cheer ourselves up. On the Sunday afternoon I dropped them at the bus depot for the journey back to Melbourne, and I checked in to a cheap motel in Kent Town where I cried because I didn’t want to go to Western Australia…but I’d finished a geology degree at the end of ’97 and figured it was the best place to go to get a job.

A couple of days later I met up with another friend who was heading back to Perth, and we left town and headed west. We spent the first night in a caravan in Kimba, then made it to Nullarbor Roadhouse. We pitched a tent and then froze our arses off, unprepared for a desert winter.

In the morning – and still freezing – an enthusiastic pilot came over and asked if we wanted a joy flight over the Great Australian Bight. We were like ‘nah, we’re right’ but then he said, ‘it’s half price!’ because he wanted to fill the little four-seater, which was enough to convince me, even though I was pretty broke.

As we taxied down the tiny runway the pilot was wiping the condensation on the windscreen with his hanky, and I wondered if I had made the wrong decision. We took off and you could hear every noise the engine made, and I wondered if it would cut out and we would plummet to the water below. And then he circled around and there they were – southern right whales, heaps of them, even a white calf. They had travelled from the cold Antarctic waters to calve in the Southern Ocean.

I only had black and white film in my camera, but I took a few shots. They were bad. The whales were a tiny speck, dwarfed by the cliffs, but they were whales all the same and somehow that was good enough for me.

It was an uplifting experience to start the day, which ended up being a non-stop Nullarbor odyssey to make it to Kambalda where we thought it would be easy to find another friend we knew and crash for the night. Dear readers, it was not. We did not find our friend, so exhausted and annoyed we checked in for the night at the Kambalda Hotel. You may know it by its alternative name, The Swinging Arms. That was my first night in Western Australia.

The next day we drove into Kalgoorlie. I heard my cousin had recently moved there to run a pub. I hadn’t seen him since we were much younger, but I went into the pub and asked after him, telling the staff his cousin had come to say hello. He came downstairs and looked at me like he’d never seen me in his life, which is fair I suppose. We’d both changed a lot. I told him I was Michael’s daughter and he immediately relaxed, and welcomed me in. We talked in the front bar for a while, and then booked a room for the night before I took my friend on the final leg to Perth. I was originally going to stay in Perth and look for work, but my cousin offered me bar work and I had a lot of experience, and the comfort of being near family made sense to me. And I needed some money.

So I took my friend to Perth, and proceeded to come down with the worst flu of my life. I spent a couple of days wrapped in a sleeping bag in front of the heater in an almost-stranger’s house in East Fremantle, which delayed my return to Kalgoorlie. I was hoping to settle in for a couple of days before my first shift, which I was told would be a busy one. In the end I arrived back in town with barely twenty-four hours to spare. The next afternoon I started work at The Palace Hotel, on a Sunday night as Diggers and Dealers kicked off.

I planned to spend a year in Kalgoorlie, and then move on to something else.

Which brings me to here. The night before another Diggers and Dealers. A quarter of a century, and half my life, later.

It’s been a common thread in a lot of conversations. People coming here for a short time and ending up staying for much longer than anticipated. As someone who’s had a love/hate relationship with this place, I acknowledge that those reasons are varied and not always a case of falling for the joint. And that’s ok.

But I wanted to mark the occasion in a way that’s meaningful and invite people with similar stories to take part in a photography project and talk about their experience, good, bad, or indifferent.

I have no idea what the final product will look like, but you will get some nice portraits out of it. I’m thinking of using a couple of beautiful old medium format cameras, too.

If you’re keen to take part, send me an email or message me via Instagram (@meldrummo) and I’ll work out a schedule. This will be long form, documentary type work, so there’s no rush.

email – hello (at) melissadrummond.com.au