WEDNESDAY 24 JANUARY     RV2

Most of the activity was at RV1. Four more SPQ dongas were delivered there. The sports court markings and setting up was finished there. Their power had been out again for a while yesterday. The cook reported that the oven was burning a hole in the kitchen floor! I phoned the fire services man to go out and fireproof the oven area. These days, I was regularly wondering what totally unthought of hiccup was going to happen next!  They were also unhappy with their water quality – not our problem, for once.

Two new ice machines were coming, from Perth, to be installed at each of the Villages. Maybe these would work better than the old ones – or were they just to supplement the old ones?

K came from RV1 to here, to collect things needed, then went back. He could have asked John to drop the stuff off, on his way past. But I was coming to the conclusion that he just didn’t want to be working on site, in the heat.

The FMG head honcho and I signed off on Milestone 5 for both the Villages – in theory meaning all was done. I wondered how many millions of dollars my signature on that piece of paper was worth?

John did eight hours work around the site with the bobcat – filling in trenches, levelling the ground, tidying up. He was a happy man – kid with a new toy! He then took the Acco and bobcat to RV1 and overnighted there.

H finished here and left for Leonora with his caravan. It was feeling distinctly lonely here.

With the camp heavily occupied with workers associated with the railway building, plus Spotless staff, there were maybe a dozen or so other women here now. This had happened back at RV1 too, last year, and I found it more comfortable to not be the only woman in camp, as I had been at times at Fly Camp. There were some women workers called “peggies” – they drove mini bus loads of workers to their allocated points along the rail route and kept their crib rooms that were out there, clean and tidy, then brought them back at the end of the day.

The Wodgina Mine manager phoned me. That had been where we had been getting water for the cementers, last year. He wanted to know if we had a record here of the water loads fetched for RV2, last year? I had not sighted any such record, which was not surprising. All I could suggest was that he use the RV1 records as a guide. Those did exist – because I had made sure of it at the time.