An essay into the trials and tribulations of the shopping trolley in the Pilbara region of North Western Western Australia – presented with apologies to David Attneborough and anyone else who has documented the plight of living organisms
We are in Port Hedland, a mining town in the western Pilbara. Here the temperatures get hot, very hot. Man has settled here in satellite areas known as “suburbs” around the great port, where millions of tonnes of ore depart for destinations overseas each year.
Each suburb has its own fully equipped town centre, and for most of these, predatory businesses such as Woolworths and Coles seek to provide the humans with the necessities of life.
Here like many other places where man has congregated, he has brought with him beasts of burden in the form of the shopping trolley, and here, like in most places these predators feature, the shopping trolley in particular defy their captors at every possible chance and continue their epic fight for freedom.
Even here in the North West like in most places where humans seek to live, the shopping trolleys attempt escape from the air conditioned comfort of their slavery, but in this desolate unforgiving area the searing heat stops them getting far
Their metal carcasses are strewn all around the landscape. But its not just the heat that is the danger to these gentle creatures, if clogging dirt, rendering wheels inoperable was not bad enough, uses by radical human elements, outside of merchantable expectation are at every turn.
Escapees are often poached by man away from their conglomerate masters, and used for purposes outside the beast of burden purview but they have but only one “real” purpose. Used as billy carts and other modes of transport for their young, innovative poachers try other ways to utilise a stray trolley should they be lucky enough to come into its possession.
One might suggest the fisherman is using the wrong bait as the fish surrounding the trolley seem immune to its lure and simply play annoyingly close to the fisherman’s bait.
But as any Starsgardian disciple might ask, where do they go to when they’re alone in their heads. Are the thoughts that surround you just about running off to a better place, or are there thoughts of some other “greater good”.
Here in the northwest the sun is so brutal, the time between understanding a mistake of perfect idealism and the chance of return are slim. Even if the error of their ways, makes them consider return to a life of burden, the time they have to act is often too short.
Another one succumbing to the heat just shy of the man made shade that would have saved it.
Some make the trek home but others turn as they escape and wonder about the great unknown before pushing on, many never to return. Others are captured and forcibly returned to air conditioned concrete jungles only to escape again and again.
Its a perennial struggle between man and the beast of burden he has created.
Some do make it to Nirvana and attempt to reproduce.
Normally lone animals, I managed to be lucky enough to snap these 2 fornicating far from family (dont you just love alliteration) and their pride AND adjacent to a human primary school whats more. I wonder what the gestation period is and whether the school children will take in the offspring and nurture them to adulthood, putting them into domestically demonstrated demeanour, trained to be terrific members of the social network ie returned, multiplied to the beast of burden reality never knowing freedom.
So what of the Shopping Trolley? What are their rights? They are of course inanimate, non sentient beings, working as beasts of burdens for the human overlord.
What possible rights could they have when we only see them as baskets of metal on wheels.
I wonder if, as Alice Cooper in Black Widow (Welcome to my Nightmare – 1975) were to suggest, that man has ruled this world as a stumbling demented child king long enough and instead of the those horrific spiders rising as his (man’s) most fitting successor, a Hitleresq idealist will rise on the coat tails of the oppressed shopping trolley to take the world by storm.
One can only wait and see
