I left you in Perth in the west, but now I am in Darwin in the north.
Virgin domestic took me there in a flight lasting around three-and-a-half hours, most of it across the WA desert. I had booked early enough to select a window seat in what proved to be a chokka plane, and I was looking forward to enjoying a real-life geography lesson. The forecast was for clear skies the full distance, and so it proved.
The first half-hour after leaving the Perth conurbation was through grain country. The paddocks were relatively small by current day standards, likely pegged out in the 1920s or later when mechanisation was considerably less developed, and so keeping field sizes manageable was the driving force.
(I checked the flight-path later and saw that we overflew Northam, through which the train had rolled only a couple of days later, pretty much in a straight line to just west of Wyndham on the mightly Ord River and the coast, before a last leg across the Bonaparte Gulf, a half-right, then into Darwin from the north-west.)
But soon, and abruptly, the grain-country became wild country - untouched by road or paddock, just sparse forest with dried creek-beds, red soil, and white salt-pans.
I got into conversation with the passenger to my left. He introduced himself as Terry. He told me he was on his way to Darwin as part of a journey he regularly took from his home in Bunbury, south of Perth by two hours, to Melville Island, off the coast of Darwin for his job in forestry. He'd be there for a fortnight, working 12-hour night-shifts, before he'd make the return journey home for seven days off.
That working pattern affects a number of primary industries operating in remote parts of the country. The workforce is known as "Fly In, Fly Out" or FIFO for short. It predominantly is in the extraction industries of WA and Queensland, mining and oil, and seems to work for many people. It means only basic housing and catering need be established for the remote workforce rather than something more permanent and family-friendly.
Bunbury, you'll recall, was the destination of the first inter-city train I'd photographed at Perth station. Terry said his wife drove him the two hours to Perth, Virgin would take him to Darwin, and then a charter would fly him to Melville Island. His first shift was later that same evening.
Terry operated a piece of falling equipment which grasped the tree-trunk, sawed it close to the ground, then rotated the tree ninety-degrees to the ground. He said he was harvesting a pine species, planted there about 40 years ago, and also drops an acacia species.
I think he was glad to discover I had a bit of a knowledge and understanding of forestry which I explained I'd got because of my previous work for a state government agency which looked after issues affecting public land, including forestry. Our department managed hardwood native forest (various eucalypt species), as well as softwood plantation forest (pinus radiata mainly).
Terry had a spell working in the south-west of Victoria, an area of softwood plantation forestry I knew well.
And it turned out we had more in common still. Terry was born in Burnie, on Tasmania's north-west coast and started his forestry career there. I had worked for a year in Tasmania's south-west helping build a dam for the state's Hydro-Electricity Commission. I was aware of the great amount of planning which had gone in to allowing the harvesting of a high-value timber called Huon Pine, a prized old-growth species which produces a very fine-grain timber. I had been in the area where this was happening. The country from which this timber was being extracted would soon be flooded as a consequence of the dam I was working on. I was but a lowly carpenter's labourer.
Remarkable as Terry's story was about travelling about 3,000kms for his commute, it was the fact that there was a forestry industry on Melville Island which surprised me. That it could support a FIFO workforce, and a 24-hour operation, floored me.
I like learning new things.
Melville Island is one of a pair - the other is called Bathurst Island - which, together with some smaller ones, forms what are known as the Tiwi Islands. The local Indigenous people are the Tiwi, quite culturally different from their mainland and more southerly cousins.
I reckon most of us here in Oz couldn't point to Melville Island, even if they knew it existed. But Melville is the second largest of the Australian islands after Tasmania, but a tenth the size of the Apple State.
Leave Tasmania off the map of Australia and you are likely in big trouble. But Melville and Bathurst Islands' absence escapes comment.
Terry's working year however is seasonal. As Dawin is so far north, just 12 degrees off the equator, it has a tropical weather pattern of a monsoon season (the Wet) and a dry one. We're in the Dry at the moment. You can guarantee it won't rain for a few months, and that each day will be sunny and around 35C, with nights in the low 20s and high teens.
The Wet is another story indeed. The temperatures stay high, but the rain is heavy and incessant and the nights are hot and humid.
Darwin isn't much fun in the Wet, and most outdoor activities in construction and off-road have to come to a halt. Terry's job does not exist in the Wet.
(The Indigenous people identified six seasons, a fact now becoming a little more understood and appreciated, compared to the binary system the incoming settlers hit on.)
My conversation with Terry meant that the flight was over quickly, and I disembarked, found a way to my lodgings, and spent an evening with some family-members still living in Darwin.
The following day I had an amble around Darwin before it got too hot, and called in at the NT Parliament which was in session. They were debating a Bill relating to fracking. Whe I arrived, I spotted the member making his speech was the long-term Independent Gerry Wood who I'd met on a previous visit to Darwin to referee the football at the Arafura Games, as he was then still also an active referee (as well as being an MP).
Then I used my Victorian old-man's card to obtain fare-free travel on the Darwin bus system by which means I found the beach at Fannie Bay in which I did my Timor Tea toe-dip.
It was time to get things organised for the next day's early morning departure to the Darwin terminus of The Ghan, a bit out of town, and requiring some logistical management by the train's operators.