Author's note: This is a story for the 2025 "On The Job" Story Event.
My first year up north in Australia's Top End had been tough. The heat and humidity were brutal, but it was the clash of cultures that was harder to cope with. I was a city boy, born and bred, and my Territorian workmates reminded me of the fact at every opportunity.
"Don't forget to press your shirt tomorrow, Bazza," sang Darren ('Dazza') if he spotted me leaving the office. Okay, it was funny the first time, and admittedly I had overdressed a bit on my first day, but after a year, the joke was worn thin.
"Remember your dictionary of Australian slang, cobber?" asked Tug when we were leaving on a three-day field trip. He'd taken great pleasure in watching my bewilderment at the language of the outback on our first trip together. I hadn't thought that it was possible to swear that much in a single sentence.
Our team leader, Bruce, had joined in the fun and games. He'd been there for 20 years and was proud of the close-knit culture. He was a great guy and kept the team together well, but he pushed the boundaries well beyond anything that Head Office, "Down South" in the populated bits of Australia's East Coast, would have been happy with. The Friday night drinks to welcome me to the team had been down at the local strip club. In fact, most major events seemed at the pub with the strippers. Bruce said it was because they had the best beer, but I think he really just enjoyed an excuse to admire the tits on stage before going home to his missus. If you were in Bruce's team, you joined the office's Breast Appreciation Society and didn't complain. And Bruce had made sure that I was there every time there was a team meeting at pub, until he was happy that I was naturalized. Bruce's boss, the local manager, was based in the city office, and seemed to turn a blind eye to some of what went on.
Bruce and Dazza were both ex-Navy. Tug, perversely, had never been to sea despite the nickname. It took me ages to find out how he actually got the nickname: apparently he'd been caught having a wank by his workmates while on a week-long trip to repair some instruments.
That was what we did. We toured around Australia's north, maintaining and fixing flood gauges, weather instruments, communication stations and related gear, making sure they were in good condition before the Wet Season hit. When the weather was bad, we stayed in our air-conditioned workshop, taking gear apart and putting it back together, calibrating it, and preparing the vehicles for the next trip.
The trips were hard work, too. We tried to do several locations a day, often with hundreds of kilometres between them on tough dirt roads. Often we had to sleep out in swags as there were no local hotels, and if we got caught out in unexpected rain, it could be bloody awful. But it was a great job too, and I'd learned more in the first year about the 'real world' than I had during all my time at university, way back Down South where Australia's better universities are.
I'd learned to appreciate my workmates beyond first impressions too. I particularly liked Bruce and Dazza. They had their weak points, but they worked hard, were easy going, and had a huge store of filthy stories for road trips. Bruce was very straightforward as a boss: he would let you know if he was grumpy or you would have done better work, but he didn't mind praising you. Dazza, the oldest amongst us, was always supportive despite his rough exterior, and he'd made sure that I knew I could lean on him as needed while I was getting my feet on the ground.
Tug was more of a closed book. He was in his forties, dark haired, physically fit and carried himself like somebody in perpetual battle-readiness. His work was fine, but he didn't share any of his private thoughts with me, and sometimes it felt a bit like he was saying things that he was expected to say depending on who was in the audience. Once, for example, I was out of the room and heard him having an almighty bitch session with Dazza when we all had to do some online training. I wouldn't have thought that stuff like 'be fair to women and don't be a racist prick' was all that controversial, because that was all it was. He shut up as soon as I got back into the room. But we got on fine.
Anyway, after a year, I could swear with the best of them, and I knew a hell of a lot about the gear that we were working with. They rarely found anything to correct in my work. I really felt one of the team. We were four blokes, working smoothly and getting our job done.
Until the rug got pulled out from under us.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The week started innocently enough. Dazza and I were in the workshop and were planning for the next trip, which was to be him and me doing a three-day circuit of some of the closer stations. It was a nice easy one.
Suddenly, we heard some explosive swearing from Bruce's office, and he stormed out, his face pale.
"Snakebite, mate?" enquired Dazza. "Better clean your office more often."
"That, I could cope with," said Bruce. He looked at me. "Barry," he said, putting on a posh voice and using my real name for a change, "you and I are summoned to the boss' office in town. Be on your best behaviour."
"What's going on?" asked Tug.
"There's a new team member arriving tomorrow from Down South," said Bruce. "Short notice: they were going to be going to Cairns but they've been sent here instead."
"That's good news," I said. "Isn't it?" I was really confused. It didn't sound like I was in trouble for anything. But why was I being called into a meeting with the regional manager?
"It's a woman," said Bruce. "Don't get me wrong, Bazza, I respect women, but we've tried that before and it just hasn't worked. They don't stay. Waste of effort."
Tug nodded and grunted in agreement, but Dazza couldn't resist a friendly dig at Bruce.
"Something to do with taking them down to Tits-Out-Tuesdays, I reckon" he said with a grin.
"I don't make them go," said Bruce defensively.
I stayed quiet. I would have thought that it was pretty obvious that the team culture needed to change if we wanted to attract women, but I suspected that Bruce didn't really want my opinion on that.
He gave me a bit of a rant on the way to the city office.
"Head Office thinks I'm a caveman, so they're probably prodding me by sending another woman here. What they don't appreciate is that I have a great team and the guys have stuck with me for years when most places lose staff every other week. If somebody new arrives, they have to work to fit in, and then they'll probably stay the course. You've done that, Bazza. Any new man or woman has to do that to. It's just that the women can't hack it so far. That's not my fault. The work up here is tough."
"Maybe she'll surprise you," I suggested nicely. "Maybe she's a butch lesbian who could wipe the floor with you in a fight and also appreciate a nice pair of tits on Tuesdays."
He snorted. "That'd be fine by me. I don't have any problem with carpet munchers."
I winced, but he was looking ahead as he drove, and didn't see it. I knew that he tried to be good to people of all types despite the derogatory language. He'd been completely relaxed when we'd dealt with people of all types when on trips together. He was also married to a Filipino woman and I'd never seen an ounce of racism from him. I could believe that he honestly tried to be fair to people, but he was such an 'ocker' kind of Aussie bloke that he was a bit hard for people to warm to when they met him, and they tended to assume the worst.
His blind spots though... you could drive a truck through them. That stuff about women not working in his team was well past its use-by date. The world had moved on.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Regional Manager's office was much larger than Bruce's, and kept neat and tidy. Ray was his name. He'd been up here for a few years and was well respected, although I knew that Bruce didn't entirely trust him because he didn't get his hands dirty in the field. But he'd always been pleasant to me when I'd met him. I still had no idea why I was in this meeting though, and was worried about it.
Ray pulled up an email on his big screen, and swivelled it so that we could both read it. As Bruce had said, it was a short notice notification that we were getting a new technician. Her name was Michelle. It didn't give much background, but she had been to the same University as me, studied a broad-based course that included biology and a couple of languages, and graduated as an electrical engineer. She'd apparently decided against an office-based career and had joined us because she wanted a hands-on job. There was also a note that her performance in the in-house training course had been excellent – she was top of her class.
"Impressive," said Bruce, obviously mindful of showing a positive attitude.
