Notes from Geraldton: People are the Best People

I grew up believing that, all things being equal, the difference between getting what you want and not getting what you want was whether or not you asked for it.

This is obviously the worldview of the youngest child.

As I got older I learnt that all things are not equal, and privilege has a lot to do with it, as it always does - either that people are more willing to give young white females what we want (I think, perhaps, under the assumption that we really are a bit helpless and needy?), or that being young, white, and female engenders us with the confidence to ask.

However I still think - at an interpersonal level, if not a societal or political level - that sometimes we underestimate the generosity of people to meet our needs because we don’t show people our needs.

So I know this. I live by this. And yet each and every field trip I am humbled by and in awe of how open-hearted and generous people can be.


This field trip started the night before when I went out for coffee with the friend who was going to look after my cat, for two weeks, for free, even though my cat is Such A Jerk. We came back to my car and discovered someone had broken my driver side mirror. The absolute and  unnecessary inconvenience of the whole thing still annoys me - and yet within half an hour, like platelets rushing to the site of a wound, my mum was offering to pick me up, my best friend was driving around Perth looking for a single roll of duct tape, and my cat-sitting friend was putting a Seinfeldian spin on things until we were both hanging in anticipation of what absurdity would befall me next.

The next day, when I realised how long it would probably take to get a replacement part on a fifteen year old Corolla and how much the delay would mess with the very tight schedule of my fieldtrip, I told my grandmother what had happened and asked to borrow her car - and just like that, my trip was back on.

(The irony of course is that the passenger side mirror on my grandmother’s car is also buggered; but it looks roadworthy, so it'll do.)

I’m staying at an airbnb while I’m here. The other day my host said to me, "I was really worried when I saw that you had booked for two weeks. I thought, what if you turn out to be horrible?" And yet this woman was going to cook a roast for me on my first night (until I convinced her I was vegetarian), stocks the fridge with other good things for me to eat, asks me how my day has been when I get home each evening, offers me advice, and calls me "Missy", "hun", and "chook".


 And then there are my interview participants. I will never get over how generous everyone has been, on every trip, to sit down with me for an hour or so and just teach me; to answer my sometimes badly worded questions and to explain things until I understand and talk with me like it’s not weird at all that I’m recording our conversations as data.

I guess the thing about working with people is that you’re forced to make yourself dependent on them - not necessarily an easy thing for researchers, even those of us in social sciences, because all research is in some way motivated by a desire for certainty and control - the opposite of dependence.  You want to know How Things Are (as if there is a single and knowable way things are), and you'd like to do it at minimum inconvenience to yourself, if possible. (Researchers who work with inanimate entities, please tell me that you at least enjoy the illusion of control?) And sometimes when you make yourself dependent on others, it doesn’t work out. For any number of reasons, it doesn't work out. But when it does - when you show up with your own needs and ask "hey, will you help me with this?" and they say "I'd love to" - it's so worth the risk.