Party Line

Apart from anything else, I've just proved to myself yet again that I am the smartest person in this room. I've worked out how to make these images enlarge without putting in an ugly extra link. Took me nearly five seconds of concentration to work it out, too, breaking my previous endurance thinking record by nearly two seconds. Which does nothing to explain why I took this photo or, indeed, posted it. You may notice an ugly white blob in the centre of the photo; that's my piece of fucking shit work ute. I parked it next to that little wooden stick because that little wooden stick is a telephone pole and I wanted to give you a visual aide to enable you to get an idea of the height of these telephone poles, which are a hangover from the old wind-up party line 'phone days - which aren't so long ago out here.
For those of you who don't know, a party line has anywhere from two to about ten different households on the same phone line. Different households had differing ring patterns to tell them when to answer and when to let it go. In those days the PMG, or Postmaster General; whose aegis telecommunications fell under, didn't have a whole big bunch of techies running around in Ford Courier 4WD utes ready to leap into action every time a crow pissed on the wire. More often than not, if the line was dead, you'd saddle a horse and start riding the wire back towards Dirranbandi, until you came to the break and then you rejoined it yourself. Of course, if the break was fairly close to town, you'd have to go to the pub just to make sure that they knew that the line had been repaired. It takes a while to tell them that so chances are by the time you returned home, the line would be down again and you'd have to repeat the process. Again and again...
Up until the last twenty or thirty years or so, most of the countryside looked like this. Half of it still does. Now you've seen the height of the poles; imagine about a fifty metre span of wire inexpertly strung, sneaking through those coolibahs, wilgas and whitewoods, and you're running scrubbers on a horse...
I've met more than one bloke who's camped at the hospital for a few days and I've heard of one paraplegic.