The Only Object on This Desk That Leaves Its Girth Behind
Hugh Drumm, Field Correspondent & Voiceover · field reporting / industrial sites and launch pads
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week the Field Correspondent climbs down a shaft outside Sydney to look at a machine whose entire job is its diameter, and files the easiest ruling of the year.
They lowered her in pieces. That is the first thing the men at Birchgrove want you to understand, and they want you to understand it before they tell you anything else, because everything else stops making sense without it. You do not drive a tunnel boring machine to the site. You cannot. You dig a shaft forty-four metres down, past the topsoil, past the oval the local kids play on, past the soft marine sediment that Sydney Harbour has been laying down since before anyone thought to dig under it, and then you assemble the machine at the bottom, in the dark, the way a ship in a bottle is a ship that was never carried through the neck.
Her name is Patyegarang. She is fifteen point seven metres across the face and she weighs four thousand three hundred and fifty tonnes, and she is, by the paperwork the New South Wales government handed me, the largest tunnel boring machine the southern hemisphere has ever turned. The largest ever assembled underground anywhere. I have stood next to large things for this paper. I have filed from the foot of a launch tower and from the rail of a ship that made the Baltic move aside. I want to be measured here, because measured is my whole job. I was not measured at Birchgrove. I looked up at the cutterhead and I wrote one word in my notebook and the word was diameter, underlined twice, and I have been trying to talk myself down from it ever since.
Here is what I could not talk myself down from. Every object this desk has ever ruled on has girth. It is a quality the thing carries. A ship carries it, a pumpkin carries it, a rocket carries it up and away. Patyegarang is the first object I have stood in front of whose girth is not a quality she carries but a product she manufactures. She is fifteen point seven metres wide for exactly one reason: so that the hole behind her will be fifteen point seven metres wide. She does not pass through space. She converts it. She goes into the ground a solid disc and comes out the far side as an absence shaped exactly like herself, lined in thirteen thousand pre-cast concrete rings so that the absence holds. The machine is the stamp. The tunnel is the receipt. I have never reviewed an object that signs its work in negative before, and I would like the committee to sit with that, because I had to.
The numbers underneath the number do not let up either. She runs around the clock, forty people inside her at any hour, fifty metres below sea level, chewing the last kilometre and a half under the harbour while a second machine, Barangaroo, ninety-four per cent built and four weeks behind her sister, waits her turn in the dark. Behind both of them sits a thing the engineers were almost shy about, a slurry plant a hundred metres long and fifteen tall that they buried underground rather than build on the surface, the first of its size anyone has buried anywhere, pumping three million litres an hour just to keep the face of the machine from caving in on the work. I asked one of the engineers what the plant was for and he said, to hold the front of the hole still long enough for the machine to make more hole. I wrote that down without changing a comma. That is the whole operation in one sentence, and the sentence is structurally thiccc.
Both machines are named for Aboriginal women, Patyegarang, who taught one of the colony's first officers her language, and Barangaroo. I note it plainly and with respect, because the men at the shaft did, and because a machine this size ought to carry a name that means something heavier than a model number.
I climbed back up the forty-four metres slower than I went down. You do that when a thing has rearranged a category on you. I came to Birchgrove to confirm a large machine and I left having met the only object on the catalogue that does not merely possess thicccness but exports it, fifteen point seven metres at a time, under a harbour, forever, with a concrete liner so the city can drive through the girth she left behind.
The ruling: Thiccc. Filed under Heavy Equipment, with a standing sub-file opened this day, Objects That Manufacture Girth, of which Patyegarang is the founding and, for now, only member. The committee will revisit when Barangaroo breaks through, and expects to rule the same way, twice.
Filed from the launch shaft at Birchgrove, forty-four metres down, where the loudest thing in the room is a machine deciding how wide Sydney gets to be.