The Tyranny of Distance
Channel: loomhigh
Date: 2022-06-11

in which I attempt to verbalize the struggle against the dictatorship of distance with a couple funny examples from Meekatharra in between. 

script extracts:
You ever wonder what the end of the earth looks like? If you do then I have an immense concern in regards to your knowledge about how the world functions and gently encourage you to dissuade yourself from flat earth theory and towards a more logically sound theory: The idea that the world revolves around me. Now that you have moved to that direction make sure to like and subscribe so that you can be closer to nature (me) as the new green revolution is the only economically sound option.

Intro

Distance is tyranny. That is a running theme I have encountered a lot in my life as a Western Australian. It literally pervades the space around this state. Everything is so far away, out of reach or barely within one's grasp. We are often forced to choose our choice of travel carefully. This is even more so the case in the days of old in Western Australia, when Model T’s were the newfangled thing and pandemics were even more annoying as instead of having to wear a mask you had to die, like a lot of die, spanish flu was rough man.

The end of the earth is often cited in history as a devilish place of foreign extradition or simply a pit in which to fall. And those medieval people, in spite of their lack of knowledge, their mind set on the pressing matters of a fallen Rome and unsettlingly insecure food supplies, had such little idea of how right they were in their pig-headed assumptions of what will soon lie beyond that dear and endless ocean of seas.

Why take the gamble? Why separate yourself with miles and miles of dirt and dust? For my family growing up there were many reasons. Sometimes it was to get away from people and the troubles they accommodate, sometimes it is a matter of isolation and its powers to amend concentration. Mainly, though, a Person moves North for the money. Nowadays it is for a wage, back then it was for gold.

When gold is the purpose of a gold town, it attracts those that consider the substance above all else.

The cost of traveling the distances to the nearest centers of people in WA is high. Even accounting for the lack of jurisdictional problems it is still hundreds of kilometers of land to traverse, dozens of liters of fuel burned, yet people still chose to pick their times almost every summer, their limited choices of movement a migration south.

Reading about Meekatharra had me pressing in my head constantly, something I overheard my mum say a few years back. We were in Albury-Wodonga, it was my first and so far only time in the Eastern States, a trip tandem in Rural Westralia to an overseas trip, with a price tag to match. We chose this one, single trip over east for the first time in over a decade, because the father of my mother, my grandad, a man partially responsible for engineering the train tracks of the pilbara to be appropriately equipped to handle the record breaking weight of the Iron Ore trains carrying away the distance inducing red dirt to foreign shores had died. a man who I regret to this day in my youthful ignorance never taking full advantage of his decades of collected technical and likely philosophical wisdom, who’s legacy left in me is little more than this train-patterned tie and a book on the Prisoner of wars of the Thai-Burma railway, of which his father, my great grandfather, endured. I remember overhearing my mother, who would later burst into tears mere minutes later as she carried her fathers coffin, confide to another bereaved of that Tyranny of distance that separated her from her Victorian family. That Tyranny of Distance. I will never forget that phrase uttered from her mouth, as I sat in the first family funeral I ever attended, but far from the first that was had. There are few things I am confident I will never forget, my memory is fickle and the flashes from my childhood are fleeting and esoteric. 
I Believe we should be pushing our power upon this tyranny. That the narratives of tomorrow must be defined by the gaps we close rather than the holes we dig.
There is a true narrative that can be told through the lens of the sandgropers struggle against the dictatorship of distance. An emotional, empty, and tense struggle of being left alone for so long. Whether it was the small gold rush that created the end of the earth, or a simple mining gig, The north has to offer endless dirt, down, around, and in your hands.

Music From: 
Zaire (https://www.youtube.com/c/ZaireMakesVideos) 
Raoul (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9_xEN8bA8ksD8qTgsRFQmw)

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