THURSDAY 16 NOVEMBER     RV1

In the low 40’s.

John had a busy day – two trips to Hedland and one on to RV2. About 700kms of driving.

BB arrived, in his Landcruiser. So did two more wet mess beer garden decks. The big gas storage bullet arrived and was installed. BB spent the day checking out the work progress here.

All sorts of oddments were being done about the place today, including installing the two new toilets John had bought yesterday. An ongoing job that started a while ago and was ongoing, as more buildings were placed and finalized, was making and installing tie downs to anchor the portable buildings. That job was occupying one of the men full time.

The four and six man dongas at Fly Camp that belonged to the company were packed up and loaded onto two trays of Brickie’s semi.

The deep fryer in the kitchen was not working. Spotless told me what they thought was wrong and I ordered the required new part they said was needed and  arranged for it to come express from Perth. They were getting very terse about all the equipment failures in the kitchen; most of that gear would have been used in whatever had been the kitchen’s prior incarnation – possibly on the Darwin Rail line building. But some of the issues were due to the power supply problems – and that was not our fault.

The electricals would not work on one of the SPQ’s in Pod 2; our on site electrician couldn’t work out what was wrong, but was adamant that the fault lay back in the building of it, in Perth. A dud fridge was found, too. Just one of the many, many little things to be fixed. A glazier I’d arranged came and fixed the broken window. I’d also arranged that the mechanic company come today to service various plant items; there was too much for one day, so they would be back tomorrow. More travel charges!

There was a problem with the bore pump – something else that was not our issue.

Eating in the mess here was very different from the Fly Camp dining. The food was much more professionally done, for starters. There was a much bigger range of choice too. At breakfast, one helped themselves, still, to cold things like fruit and cereals, and cooked our own toast on a big, rotating toast maker. (That was one of the kitchen fitments I hadn’t been able to identify when collecting serial numbers!) There was a large range of cooked breakfast foods available from the servery. In a separate corner of the serving area, there were the lunch crib makings set out for one to assemble their own, to take away. Again, a really large range – lots of lovely salads, sandwich fillings and the like, down to hard boiled eggs, different types of olives and even artichoke hearts. At dinner, we queued up to collect our meal at the servery – a range of offerings including roasts, casseroles, steak cooked to order, other meats, vegetables and salads. There were desserts of course – choices amongst hot and cold ones. Excellent food.

Obviously, the camp set up was geared to workers doing hard physical work out in the hot sun, for at least eight hours a day, with nutrition to suit. This particular sedentary office worker needed to really resist the temptation to eat too much!