At check-in, she says, she watches the X-ray operator closely, anticipating their double-take. She suspects that one day her case will be pulled from the queue and publicly unpacked, so she keeps a letter of explanation from her employer folded in her handbag. To date, the airport staff have always been too busy screening the mineworkers boarding at that early hour – swabbing their bags and jackets for explosives, making provision for the transportation of industrial detonators – to react to one rubberised phallus, flashing across their monitors with the slapstick punctuality of a prank. My mother’s case coasts through unopened, flanked by pairs of steel-capped boots that pile in a clunking tangle on the end of the conveyor belt. In thick socks, their owners shuffle through the metal detector. Once I got a kick out of the idea of the plastic penis sailing through the luggage scanners, a little feminist rush from that incursion into the coercively masculine space of the mines. But one way to explain what my mother is doing with the plastic parts of a man she is conveying up north is that she is participating in a symbolic order whereby the worker is unembodied.
What do You think about The Best Australian Essays 2015?
