“But, I know they’re just two-man twelve by twelve huts, but that’s our home…”
“I’m not sure the company shares that point of view, or has even thought of it.”
And that night my hut mate, Johnny Mac, was strumming his guitar working up a song called “We All Live In a Yellow Construction Hut”, following the Beatles' “Yellow Submarine”. Suddenly, he dropped the guitar on the floor, “Bugger them,” he said, “they can stick my concert at the Opera House.” And we went to the wet canteen.
I don’t think the Yak had anything to do with the prawn and oyster shells, baguette crusts, empty caviar and pate jars and champagne bottles, strewn between the huts of the single men’s camp one morning a few days later. The debris already reeking under the Queensland sun. And I doubt he knew about the canteen freezer door nearly off its hinges with a mutilated heavy-duty padlock hanging from it. With him though, I was never sure, he was a loner. Anyway, after breakfast that day, as we were assembling to be driven out to work, the engineer in charge of the job stood on the back of a ute, with a policeman on either side, and said to the two hundred of us, “Men, there’s no smoke without fire, but if any one of you wants to tell me who has done this crime, I’ll not let on who it was.” And we all grinned at him.
Mind you, no one was suggesting the men from the married quarters, who were joining us, knew about the raid. The presence of wives and kids in the caravans conferred a respectability on them which eluded the single men, and most of us thought that was fair enough.
Of course, it’s true there’s no smoke without fire, but time was getting away from preparations for the ministerial visit, and more beautiful food was flown in the day after the theft of the first lot, and was kept under police guard. But people like heavy equipment mechanics and their mates, for whom substantial padlocks and thick freezer doors are more of an afterthought than a challenge, had already taken their satisfaction.
