Series Two - Revised Introduction

The Wildflower Arcade began as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge of 2011.  I have decided to take up the story where it left off then, and develop it further.  The goal is 30 posts of about 1600 - 1700 words over 30 days, making a total of 50,000 of novel writing for the month.  I trust you will enjoy the journey.

Quarabup is a small country town on the south coast of Western Australia.  Its population of about 15,000 has been fairly stable for the past decade, without much sign of stimulus and growth.  It is the focal point for road, rail and shipping systems for the transportation of various primary products, most notably wool, wheat and barley, live sheep and cattle exports, woodchips from tree farms (not native forests) and a small industry based on mineral sands.

The farming hinterland is primarily made up of large sheep and wheat farms.  Broad acre cropping combined with the production of sheep for both wool and meat were the two enterprises that sustained the town in its early life.  Later, beef cattle were added to the range of livestock raised in the region.  Over the past decade or two, however, many of those farms have been sub-divided into much smaller blocks for vineyards and strawberry farms.  The styles of wine from the south coast region are quite different from those in the more famous Margaret River area, but growers have developed the market and have many devotees.  The strawberries from this region compete in Perth with those grown on the margins of the city, but the cooler climate is much better for the fruit and provides a longer growing season.  

The town itself was founded in 1833 just 4 years after the European settlement of the state.  The shipping harbour was its main attraction – sheltered from the prevailing westerly winds and naturally deep making it ideal for large ocean-going ships.   Just east of the harbour lies a riverine estuary that provides a safe shelter for a significant fishing fleet.  This industry provides the foundation for a healthy fish market, open daily for the whole range of fish that were caught in the area.  Fish was processed, frozen and canned in the town as well.

The town lies just east of vast tracts of old-growth forests and was once home to the largest log mill in the state.  Milling in Quarabup has decreased in recent times, and other towns have since claimed the “largest mill” status, but milling is increasingly difficult in these environmentally sensitive times.  Even wood-chipping of tree-farm logs gets some of the ferals riled, but wood-chipping has supplanted mills in Quarabup as the form of processing of timber products that keeps unemployment in the town low.  Mechanical loggers harvest the trees, which are then transported to Quarabup by road or rail for chipping and then shipping to the great paper mills of the world.

A small mill still processes logs into timber for the local construction industry using plantation hard woods, but also doing some fine value-add work on a small allocation each year of native forest timbers, harvested in ways that even the ferals have to admit does the forest good.  The large global timber firm, Cannons, applies constant pressure on the economic and political systems to gain access to further tracts of forest but to date they have been held at bay so far as Quarabup is concerned.

This diverse economic base for the town provides a steady demand for work and a decent level of income for the people and the town.  In other communities, where mineral resources have abounded, a kind of mono-culture has developed with high incomes for the few, and boom and bust cycles of economic activity.  Quarabup has managed to retain much of its rural charm, resisting developmental forces that would turn it into a satellite suburb of Perth, and the lack of mineral development has avoided the tendency common in other places for it to become dusty and grubby.

There are three distinct social groups within the Quarabup community. 

There are, in their own view most importantly, the landed gentry of the region.  These are the descendants of those early settlers who took up large selections of land in the hinterland.  As their wealth grew they took up positions of influence and power in the town as well, positions that ensured they held control of the future development of the town.

Then there is a solid middle and working class group of people.  These are the backbone of the town, really.  They provide the stable workforce.  They provide the enterprise of much of the small business in the town.  They sit on school and community committees that add so much value to social life in small country towns.

Finally, there is a small but vocal group of recent arrivals who are social and political activists commonly referred to in the village as the ferals.  They seem to cluster in the western edges of the town where their leaders have taken up residence in the old millers huts that were evacuated some years ago when Cannons got rid of their unionised workforce and removed the provision of accommodation as a working condition.

The ferals are determined to stand out in the crowds.  The men wear brightly coloured happy pants and Indian-styled cheese-cloth shirts.  They cultivate their hair into dreadlocks – indeed some have been known to take on the appearance of this by using hair extensions to save time – and they dye their hair in various shades of green or purple.  The women generally wear long flowing dresses, again in bright colours, and while fewer seem attracted to the dreadlock look for their hair, they also dye their hair in various shades of green and purple, in addition to the vibrant red of their favoured natural henna dye. 

It is also interesting that the ferals found ready allies among the local Noongar people.  Their sub-group, the Minang, is responsible for the country taken from them by the settlers, as well as the many sacred sites within the old-growth forest areas that remain.  None live traditionally any more, but those who have lived on the margins of the towns of the south coast for generations now, are working hard to rekindle their language and customary heritage.  Public schools even teach the local indigenous language to all students.

No-one quite knows where the ferals derive their income.  Some clearly rely on social security because they can be seen on a regular basis at the local Social Security offices.  Others try to make income from the production of goods that can be sold at the weekend markets.  Some cultivate what land they have very intensively so as to produce as much as they can for their eating needs, thus reducing the amount of cash they need.  Others have jobs – regular jobs where most of their colleagues would hardly know they belonged to the ferals.

The social order of Quarabup was created around a fairly constant tussle between the forces of the old money in town, the landed gentry, and the ferals who took it as their responsibility to resist, at every opportunity, all forms of development proposed for the town that would change the landscape, economic base or social structure of Quarabup.  At various times, as at present, a degree of equilibrium is achieved between the two interest groups as they jockey for positions of influence and leverage that will secure their wishes or at least lesser outcomes that they are prepared to live with.

It is within this microcosm that the story which will unfold in The Wildflower Arcade is born.  Personal position, ambition and social place for all the characters is born out of this mix of history, power and influence.

The Wildflower Arcade is a small shopping precinct on the main street of Quarabup.  The retail precinct is much as it has been for more than 50 years with staple stores such as the News Agent, Dry Cleaners, various cafes, clothing stores and souvenir shops.

On the southern end of Main Street was an old warehouse type store that incorporated a local grower’s market, a fish market and what most would call a supermarket which was still in the hands of a local Cooperative.  In this way the residents felt they could best look after each other – buying local produce top the max and benefitting each cooperative member from the purchase of those brought in goods that are inevitable in the modern household.  In an effort to increase their buying power, the Cooperative had joined the generic brand of independent supermarkets but the franchise was still run by the cooperative.

The Wildflower Arcade was situated at the northern end of Main Street where it veered off to the north west towards the tourist highway through the forest.  As such it was at a focal point in the retail precinct – a little hub of specialty shops with the everydayness of a continental café and a hairdresser’s salon.

Life in Quarabup is generally pretty unspectacular but recent events on the Shire Council have rather polarised the community.  The Shire President, Sam Malone, has connections to a proposed canal development that he is trying to keep concealed, and during the course of this series of The Wildflower Arcade he will go to same rather extreme lengths to keep those links concealed.