Rough as Guts

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s rough as guts out here.  It’s the kind of place where you can turn the corner and find a woman squatting in the gutter for a pee.  She’d have had her nickers around her ankles if she’d been wearing any.  The fences are high and the windows barred, the glass behind grimy.  Even the water is hard, thick with minerals that clog your shower-head and stain your toilet bowl.

There’s no gloss here. No ornate facades meticulously restored to the cha-ching of the Bunnings cash register.  No cafe strip.  The cappuccino’s are served flourish-free, and a large is a “mugaccino”, the pun completely unintended. 

When I first came here, I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive without coffee.  I’d been working in the city where you were never more than fifty metres from a decent cup, hot but not too hot.  It had become a basic human right.  An essential that in my opinion should have qualified for GST-free status.

But not out here. My coffee was another victim of that rock hard water and it didn’t end there.  Good quality fresh food.  Being able to buy everything on your shopping list at the supermarket.  Reading the Sunday paper... on Sunday.  Express Post.  Shopping that doesn’t require an internet connection.  The list goes on.  

Four years on and somehow, miraculously even, I have survived.  More than survived.  I’m happy.  Enjoying a lifestyle free of the pressure of convenience.  It would seem that all of those essentials come with a cost that I don’t pay out here. When the Sunday paper arrives on Monday morning, it doesn’t bring with it those glossy magazines, flaunting before me page after page of the next “must-have” that I can’t afford and won’t feel complete without.  I’m blissfully unaware and I like it that way.

But I also understand.  This living in Tennant Creek rough as guts thing - it’s not for everyone.