Below is an extract from David Astle’s new book, Cluetopia – The Story of 100 Years of the
Crossword, published by Allen & Unwin. A travel through time, Cluetopia celebrates the
crossword’s maiden century with 100 mini-chapters from around the world, one for each
year along the way. Here is 1998, a chapter with a very bent artistic bent:
1998 – Kind of artistic craving causes interference (8)
engineers adjusted the ballast. Only then could the
crane hoist the rig upright. What followed was the
pile-driving. Steel pipes were fed down the jacket’s
legs, joined by tonnes of cements and grout, as the
pile-driver pounded the structure into the seabed,
the noise the music they play in hell.
To escape the racket, Andrew made figurines,
sculptures in miniature, carving the leftover nubs of
welding chalk. He used a hacksaw blade to fashion
amulets no bigger than your fingertip.
His other ploy was solving crosswords. A chopper
delivered the Herald-Sun every day, along with
Back in the late 1980s, Andrew Gangioti
fresh food and supplies. The paper lay open in the
worked on a construction barge in Bass Strait,
mess room for anyone to try their hand. “Night shift
cleaning the cabins and decks. “The job was pretty
got pretty boring, so we started filling in the
mindless and noisy. Two weeks on, two weeks off –
crossword – me, the other cleaner and the laundry
seven till seven, day or night. But you made good
guy.
money.”
“If you were passing or grabbing a coffee, you filled
The barges were responsible for dragging the
in another answer.” Just the quick, but that was
massive scaffold (or jacket) of the strait’s oil
perfect. One guy’s breakthrough would lead to
platforms. At the critical moment, the vessel would
someone else’s. By the time morning came the
half-sink into ocean, immersing the jacket as the
puzzle was usually complete, a team effort.