The front entrance was neat and green. Urban, urbane, with a number one cut and a battery of sprinklers tossing out loops of water. The compound out back was a more honest manifestation of your whitefeller approach to the bush: huge and brutal, an armada of yellow earth-moving plant and equipment encased in barbed wire. The air was thick with diesel fumes and testosterone, the yard hummed with the hiss of pumps and guns, the rattle of running motors and men. When I asked for Wishy Ozolins, a jaunty receptionist directed me through to the Regional Manager’s office. There sat Ozolins himself, as out of place in an office as a camel at a cat show. He was an outdoors man if ever I saw one. That was where he’d been the first time I’d seen him: striding across the gravel with the sun on his face and his loved ones around him. His office window looked out onto the yard, and from the angle of his desk and the grimace on his face as he contemplated the pile of paperwork in front of him, I suspected Ozolins spent a lot of time looking at it as well.
