In the 90's, the Sunshine Coast was home to one of the biggest sugar mills in the world. All around my hometown of Coolum were sugar cane fields for as far as the eye could see. Every summer, 'if' it rained, the farmers would have a bumper crop of sweet cane and I'd have something legendary to watch. You see, sugar cane loves to be flooded (something monsoon rains do well!) but train tracks don't handle floods so well. Spring was the time when the linesmen would repair the tracks for the late winter harvest and I'd beg dad or mum to take me down to watch the linesmen do their work. They were tough guys with torn singlets, sun-burnt skin, Marlboro cigarettes and mouths like sewers. They'd lug welders along and sizzle and pop the cane-train tracks back together. Those fellas were my heroes and I'd rip and grease my t-shirts to try and look like them.
I was riding up out of Stuttgart around 2:00am a couple weeks ago when I heard the unmistakable hissssss of the linesmen working on the tram tracks. These linesmen were a little different to my Aussie childhood memories but with an equally firm handshake. "You'll wanna tuck ya eyes in and this smoke's toxic!" one of them said to me in thick Swabian before plonking himself back down on his wooden box.
If you put your eight-year-old-boy glasses on, these fellas'll become your heros too.
Leica iiif | Elmar 50mm 3.5 | Ilford HP5 @ 800 | Kodak D76 1:1 @20° 16:30
