Who would have thought the twelve hundred bogans had so little fight in them?
It was a bad word, a word Will Fulbright knew he shouldn’t use, not even to himself, but bogan was the word for them. He had expected a riot, he wanted a riot, he felt he deserved a riot. He was entitled to more from them, and right at this moment, looking down from his Everest of self-pity, he was sure he owed them nothing.
Will was sitting in the back row of a large dining hall-cum auditorium in the middle of nowhere. A sea of men in hi-vis gear was lapping against the walls. Something bad was about to happen to them, and to Will, and either they didn’t realise it, or they were too piss-weak to protest. Whichever it was, Will felt his co-workers at Madeleine’s Monster, the world’s freshest iron ore mine, were letting him down.
A man – Justine’s mate, her philanthropist, her benefactor, of all people – was standing on a small stage down the front speaking into a microphone. Around forty, well-dressed, well-groomed, well-tanned, handsome and charismatic – and gesturing hammily with his free arm – he spoke with an irksome, lulling, chocolaty mid-Pacific twang in that American presidential shop-floor style.
And they were all buying it. Will glanced around the room, trying not to meet anyone’s eye. He needn’t have worried. All were spellbound to the man with the microphone. The building they were in was barely nine months old. Will had been part of the team that supervised its erection by a multinational construction giant.
They had fitted it out with the soul of a casino: 6.30 am might have been midnight or midday. Outside, he knew, the silent white sun was pinning up a cobalt sky, etching hard shadows in the bloodshot-orange Pilbara earth. Inside, hundreds of strip lights were humming their fluorescent song of hospital green: 50Hz of nowhere to hide. This shadowless space was new but already it stank of curing glue and walked-in diesel, of scrambled eggs and red dust and sweat, of . . . One of the bogans had farted…
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