The Shit Hits the Fan

In the last posting, I hinted at trouble in Paradise. As many of you will have heard by now, Terry and I have left Robinson River and are slowly meandering home. (It feels hard to get used to the idea that 'home' is no longer Robinson River.)


This blog will become a travelogue for a while - not Bill Bryson standard I'm afraid (I wish!), but then Bill Bryson didn't have pictures- and then I will finish it. But before I do, I will try to explain what happened.  There is both a language warning for the following posting, and the use of extreme sarcasm which will undoubtedly offend a few of my newer readers.

Those of you who know my maninganja, Terry, may be surprised to know that within that mild mannered, grey-bearded bespectacled 61 year old, beats the heart of a trouble maker and miscreant.
These are some of the misdemeanours he committed at Robinson River:-
(i) When he arrived, the Head of Management made quite clear to him whom he was permitted to talk to, whom he was to socialise with, who was  (and I quote) "a dickhead" in the community, and therefore to be avoided. Instead of appreciating this clear and useful directive (which would have helped him avoid trouble from the start), he decided that he was big enough and old enough to make his own friends and contacts. He therefore went ahead and talked to said dickheads, and found he liked them for their sanity, common sense and kindness.

(ii) He socialised with all the wrong people, including, and you may not realise how inappropriate this is in a community that is less than 10% white, the black residents. They even came into his house and had cups of tea and bikkies at his table, disregarding unwritten laws passed down from the good old days of the 19th century when everyone knew their place.. His partner, completely out of control with an unseemly and unwifely will of her own, even invited black children into the house. (What was I meant to do when mobs of bright eyed, lively, curious, friendly kids clustered around the door, just busting to  come in and check out the toilet, the huge double bed, the white walls, my earring collection, as well as help themselves to the bulging fruit basket? Tell them to bugger off? I can't find that response in my book of Decent Manners. I was living in their country after all)

(iii) Terry was well liked and beginning to be trusted by the black community, giving the lie to the Party Line that "they all hate us , ya know". Now, I felt mistrust at times, I felt shyness, I felt indifference, but I only ever heard and felt hatred directed towards certain members of Management. And we did not include ourselves in that "us"

(iv) Terry was obviously unwilling to submit the very popular community newsletter, which he started as a literacy exercise, and which the community quickly and proudly came to regard as their voice, to the appropriate authority for identification and removal of offensive content which may have disturbed the Social Order. The Chief Censor, who also doubled as Head of Management- he's a busy guy ensuring  Social Harmony and controlling incipient anarchy- did not believe that Terry was spending his time with interested members of the community  (the numbers increasing with every issue), teaching them how to use computers and the internet, giving them confidence with their self expression and introducing them to the joys of writing and reading. The CC knew, as he knew everything that was happening in every corner of his little empire, as well as everything else in the known universe, that Terry was writing it all himself, instead of doing what he was paid for.

(v) While Terry was writing the community newsletter, while pretending that it was being written by his students, his errant missus, over whom he had no control because he is not a Real Man, was distributing offensive and disturbing material, including pictures of naked children, on the internet via her blog. Now, you readers may have missed that and thought you were reading a harmless personal diary, with words carefully chosen to not offend my hosts, the Aboriginal residents of RR, and seen some sweet pictures of kids playing in the river (while wearing, incidentally, swimmers or knickers). And members of the Aboriginal Council, many of whom are not great readers and none of whom had access to the internet anyway, claimed, when asked, that they had never heard of the blog and therefore could not have been offended by its content. They needed to be informed of my wickedness, because I took the blog down until Terry had left the community. Of course, once told by the CC that I was publishing pictures of their naked children for strangers to peruse, their desired offence was assured.

(vi) Terry had the temerity to assume that his many years of teaching in remote aboriginal communities, and his Masters degree in communication and literacy gave him the odd notion that he knew something about teaching literacy. He had the notion that it takes time- especially in aboriginal communities, and involves developing -earning- trust, the flexibility to respond to individual needs and abilities and personalities,  and required the arousal of love of the written word and the existence in the community of stuff that people are eager to read.
He didn't realise that the 19th century missionary style of treating adult students as ignorant children and forcing them to sit at desks in classrooms learning their letters and practising their handwriting so they could read the limited amount of dull material available to them, and fill out Centrelink forms, was the only way to teach people to read.
Terry did actually agree that formal classes had a place in the teaching of literacy, but he also believed that learning to become comfortable with the written word was empowering and opened the door to self determination. See what I mean about him being a trouble maker? He probably voted Labor as well. Or worse.

There were many more misdemeanours, (including his desire to keep the Garrawa language and stories alive) but suffice it to say, he was clearly offered a place on the (white) Team- a chance to unquestioningly follow the Party line- and knocked it back, thus ensuring his own downfall. He has joined the long line of 'dickheads' that have fallen foul of Head of Management over the years. The tears and anger at his departure were simply evidence that the locals didn't know what was good for them.

Terry didn't understand that zero tolerance of different points of view, or mindless non-questioning of the ultimate authority of the Head of Management, was the only way to stop the community descending into social chaos and dysfunction. In that funny way of his, Terry believes that a healthy functioning community is one in which lots of different ideas are valued, discussion is encouraged, disagreements are settled without threats and intimidation, and co-operation is achieved by listening, consultation and consensus, rather than control and coercion.

Silly boy.

Till next time.

I am now back in Sydney's Inner West - back to the land of gelato, and bike riding, of more choices than I know what to do with (hazelnut will do thanks), where shopping can take hours; of pale children who are afraid of dogs, of helicopter parents (where 'parent' is a verb as well as a noun); to the pervasive nostalgic smell of jasmine cascading over grey paling fences.  To the land of soft feet, the wearing of supportive undergarments and cosmetics, of hairdressing. To the land of four seasons- and this one is spring! Of temperate weather, of no prickles, snakes or crocodiles, where the wildlife that avoids becoming roadkill is fiercely protected instead of eaten. Back to people who know my history and speak my language.

But I am not a natural traveller- I put down roots quickly- and I feel disturbingly disoriented and displaced being here. The speed of plane travel (termed, for some reason, 'convenient') doesn't help. I feel I need to keep up the blog to tie my 2 worlds together.  I miss Robinson River more than I expected, and one of the oddest effects of being here is a fear of driving. Having driven for 40 years, it has become mostly automatic, but inside me a terrified voice is squealing, "My god, don't you people realise how dangerous this is- hurtling along at such speed in this steel cage. This could kill people! Stop! Stop!"  And that is before well before reaching the suburban speed limit of 50K.

To elaborate on the travel theme, I offer the following pictures:-

This is the Transit Lounge at Robinson River airstrip. It might look like a toilet block- well, it is a toilet block, I suppose, with seating attached- but it is also the best designed and built building in town, and is curiously pleasant to sit in. It does feel like a place of transition. You need to have experienced the Wet to understand why the roof is sloped down towards the middle instead of up. (It had to be explained to me).

And here am I in the Transit Lounge, being curiously pleased to sit there, and also childishly excited, as I always am, at the thought that human beings can fly and I am about to do so.

This is the 2 engine plane that will take me to Darwin. When I saw it, I felt even more excited at the idea of flowing low over the vast Gulf country, sitting next to the pilot and having all the buttons and levers and blinking lights on the control panel explained to me.

This is my last moment of pleasure for the day- pretending to be a celebrity waving goodbye to the adoring crowd on the tarmac.

What I didn't realise about tiny planes is that they are tossed about by the air currents like a kite on a string, and fly too low to avoid them. I spent the whole trip to Darwin with my eyes clamped shut and my head held over a convenient Esky, throwing up and retching and shuddering, for 3 hours. And the 3 hours after that sitting like a zombie at Darwin airport waiting for my legs to stop shaking. The pilot thanked me for using the Esky and not the floor. It made her day a lot easier.

I prefer travelling this way.

 This is called the Capricornia Highway which goes from the Stuart Highway to Borroloola. It is mostly one lane wide. and it is prudent and courteous to to slow down and pull to the side when someone is coming in the opposite direction or passing, which isn't often.

This is the road from Borroloola to RR. The good bit of it.  You can see to the right that the land is burnt. The NT bush is dotted with patches of these burnt bits- 'mosaic burning'. Burning has been a traditional way of caring for the land for ever, and park rangers have continued to do it on crown land  (which is what most of NT that hasn't been hasn't claimed under Native Title, is).  I know it's been done for millenia, and it leads to lush bright regrowth and Australian plants have evolved to need fire to regenerate, and all that, but I still feel weird about it.

At first the country all looks the same, and then, after a while, you realise that the vegetation actually changes all the time. Big trees, little trees, different shrubs, different coloured flowers, different coloured leaves, predominantly eucalypts, predominantly acacias, or grevilleas I don't recognise, or plants I can't identify yet.

Doing what 4WDs are designed to do- crossing rivers! I can't call drivers of 4WDs 'wankers' anymore- everybody here drives one, and they are all dusty and dirty and covered in mud. And driven till they die, it would seem. And no dark windows around here. (What is it with the dark windows? Fantasies about being a gangster, a member of the Royal Family?)

Come to think of it, I haven't called anyone a  wanker for ages.

Not Louisiana.

 

 

 I had only been in the Territory for 3 days, and on the road for less than 24 hours, when I found myself admiring the beauty of this big shiny blue truck. The photo doesn't do it justice. I did wonder what was happening to me.

And on the road you get to meet English tourists who try to get their dachshunds to pose for a photo.

(All the staff in the roadhouses are Irish backpackers!)

.

And here, finally is that photo of the store at Borroloola that I knew I had taken back when we drove there on my way to RR for the first time, and I realised with a shock that I was now in blackfellas country.

*      *        *        *

Every evening I get to hear the news from RR. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I always have a problem working out how to tackle the Bad and the Ugly on this blog, so I will put that off till next posting, and end this one with the Good.

One of the consequences of the rediscovery and development of the literacy they learned in primary school (Terry is employed here as as adult literacy and numeracy teacher), is that a couple of people have taken on a project to record the community's history- to write down the old people's stories and research the written (white) records of the time. A big task. Of course, history always encompasses the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, but while hearing some of these stories I gained a possible insight into the character of RR. 

The fact that it is a dry community is undoubtedly the main reason it feels so safe (except from bloody dogs whose proprietorial instincts increase with the setting of the sun and necessitate my carrying a big stick when walking into town at night), and makes the nightly patrol merely a chance for a bunch of lucky kids to get a nighttime ride in the back of a gator. But through hearing some of the stories, we have found out that kids from RR and the outstations were not 'removed' (stolen). 

Because the town and outstations are so isolated, no-one can just suddenly turn up unannounced, either by road or air-  arrival is always expected, so that every time They came to take the 'half-caste' children away, all the children in the community had disappeared into terrain too inhospitable for white people to follow. There is even one lovely story from one of the oldest women, about a boy, an old man himself now, who taunted the white men from a ridge above their heads "Na.. na.. na...you can't get me". Another child had his pale skin darkened with charcoal, and he's still here too. 

In a shameful history of relentless dispossession, characterised by government sanctioned bastardry, unspeakable cruelty and recreational massacres, these are heartwarming stories of strength and survival. But I can't help feeling that managing to triumph over the Aboriginal Protection Act (or whatever it was called- a perfect example of George Orwell's NewSpeak) and keep their children, has given the people of this place a cheerfulness, openness and even trust, and strong sense of community and social cohesion -despite the loss of much of the tradition that used to bind communities- that has surprised me. It is true that I have experienced no other Aboriginal communities, my main source of knowledge of them coming indirectly from all the publicity surrounding the Intervention, and I have only been in this one for a few weeks, but Terry has worked in other communities for much of his adult life and he agrees that this one is noticeably cheerful.

Stealing the land that has nourished a people- physically and spiritually- for thousands of years, and depriving them of their own language- forcing children to speak English by beating them if they spoke in their own tongue and terminating the brief flowering of bilingual education (as is the case now), was/is a very effective way to destroy a culture, but taking children away tears out the heart, of mothers and families and communitites. For generations.

STOP PRESS

Those of you who read this posting before I took the blog down, will remember that there were some photos of a bunch of kids playing around the river, in this spot. After weeks of hesitating, I eventually asked Terry to to explain the nature of a blog to their mothers/guardians, and ask their permission to publish the photos of their kids, which they willingly gave, I emailed some of you to explain why I took the blog down temporarily, but I have permanently removed the photos so that the permission-givers cannot be identified and given a hard time. Things at RR have got that bad. Read on ................

 Missy.

Sometimes, especially of an evening, this place feels like a bucolic hamlet in the woods. The sort of place where the same families have lived for generations, and only the most adventurous leave to 'seek their fortunes in the big wide world'. 

But sometimes it feels like a really harsh environment,  a tough frontier town, and that's what I've been experiencing lately.

I knew before I came that I would have to Toughen Up to live here. I saw it as Growing Up (finally).    I was dreading the process as well as looking forward to it.  After all, if I eat other creatures I should be able to face the means whereby they get from a happy life scratching around in the sun, to my plate.  I even feel squeamish at the now-nightly toad hunt, especially when they (in tightly sealed plastic bags) occupy the same little freezer space as the frozen passionfruit yoghurt I am trying to perfect (I think the secret is lots of bananas).

 I was envisioning challenges in the form of, as I have mentioned, the killing and eating of bush food- turtles and echidnas are both relished around here. I never imagine it would come in the form of this little poppet.

Every household here has dogs of course. According to Terry, the dogs here are well looked after in that they are fed, rather than expected to look after themselves. They wander round, occasionally fighting each other, digging holes, sleeping in the sun or in the shade, barking both day and night and getting yelled at for doing so, and chasing after me. A good life for a dog. If they ever wander too far in a pack, get in with a bad crowd ("dingoes") and chase cattle they are summarily shot, so I have been told. 

People here are fond of their dogs, and are often proud of them- proud in the way that leads to many of them not being desexed when the vet pays a visit for that purpose- but the dogs could not be described as 'pets'. This is true of most country dogs, I guess, but the attitude to animals in Aboriginal communities is definitely a challenge to an urban animal lover.

A while ago, I noticed a little girl who was a frequent visitor to the house, nursing a tiny puppy, with barely opened eyes, often holding it by one leg as if it were a rag doll.  Imagining that it had been taken out of the litter to be played with, and remembering how I had longed to cuddle my grandmother's cat's tiny kittens as soon as they were born but not being allowed to do so as they were too young until their eyes opened and their curiosity overcame their fear at being removed from their mother - I used to come home from school and sit by their box, watching them longingly, waiting for the time when they were old enough to be picked up by me without squealing in terror, and having to satisfy my longing with gentle stroking of their squirming backs- I told her to take the puppy back to its mother. That it was too young, its eyes were barely opened etc etc. She looked blankly at me, and I was starting to panic, until the teacher who lives next door came out, took charge of the puppy and walked the girls home, where, I imagined, there was a placid old dog with distended teats and a look of blissful exhaustion on her face as she suckled a litter of pushy puppies.

Of course, I realised much later that the girl had absolutely no idea what I was talking about (a common experience, as you may have gathered), and not just because of my syntax.

Then, on Friday, I was asked to look after a new puppy- "Missy"- for the weekend while its owner went to the Doomadgee Rodeo. It looked too young to be taken from its mother but seemed well enough, and Marj was a caring responsible young woman.  It, along with another two, including the one I had seen earlier, had come from a litter on an outstation miles away.

All puppies are gorgeous but because this one was too young to be taken away, she treated the whole world like a litter, pouncing and tumbling and playing and biting, and then suddenly falling asleep in a heap. She whined to be with us at night, and slept snuggled against my warmth all night, pouncing on my face in the morning, sucking my ear lobes and biting my hair.  She was completely entrancing, utterly time consuming, and I fell in love with her, as did everyone who saw her.  She followed me everywhere, until she got tired and had to be carried, and tried to catch my toes as I walked. She was really clean (I cleaned her with a damp washer, like mother dogs do with their tongues- you getting the picture of my besottedness here?) and she smelled lovely.

However, gobble as she might, she didn't seem to be able to hold down any food or water, and over 2 days became more and more lethargic and sick.  I was frantic, helplessly watching her starve, and longed for the luxuries of city life- a vet!- for the first time. After 2 days, the community nurse came to the rescue with an IV bag of 5 % glucose infusion and a syringe (by this time, the puppy couldn't hold her head up and sip from a bowl). A Google search told me that unweaned puppies can't tolerate the lactose in cow's milk-  no puppies can but they can eat other stuff once they are weaned (of course there was a vicious argument about this on an internet thread).

She sucked greedily from the syringe and seemed to pick up quite a bit, and I was able to hand her back to Marjorie on Monday, alive and wagging her tail. We also ordered a tin of puppy formula from the vet in Katherine, and it arrived the next day on the mail plane. But we soon heard that the other 2 puppies died and ours followed the next day. I was prepared for the worst, even though she seemed like  a little fighter and so full of life, but that night I absolutely lost it.

I lay in bed looking out the window at the huge starry sky and railed against the place - at the strain of trying to create a place for myself in a community that was indifferent to me, and to animal welfare (I should add that Marjorie was also very sad at losing her puppy); at the feeling that I had to gird my loins, so to speak, to leave the house and enter the community every morning; at living with people whom I didn't understand and who didn't understand me, and at the imbalance of the need to be understood; at 'their' ignorance of everything that I had learned at my grandmother's knee (of course I understood that I was totally ignorant of everything 'they' had learnt at their grandmother's knees, which was what they needed to know to live in their world, but at this moment being understanding was not a priority);  exhaustion at trying so bloody hard all the time, at having to tread so carefully, always; that this place felt so harsh and cruel and hard.

At the same time I felt uneasy that it was the death of a puppy that released this furious flood, when at the other end of town people live in extreme poverty and overcrowded unhealthy and dangerous squalor, and that many would not reach my age before they succumbed to chronic disease.  And this is a relatively healthy, functioning Aboriginal community.

After a while, with the help of my maningandya, I realised that life everywhere is harsh. The harshness is just better covered up in cities where you live in a group of people who think like you and reaffirm your reality, where death and the consequences of poor education and poverty can be kept at arms length if you are lucky and have enough money (until they can't any longer!).  Where suffering is hidden behind walls, guarded by privacy and anonymity and not-your-business:- walls of private houses, of abattoirs, of hospitals, of nursing homes. Here, it's all in your face.

And that's why we all need those young things in our lives, why we love them so unconditionally and crave their presence so passionately. We need their joyfulness, their freshness, their playfulness, their innocence- their lack of corruption and guile and cynicism- their softness, their trust and affection, their dependency. Whether they come from our bodies or someone else's, whether they be human, or animal, or bird, or even plants I suppose, new life gives us hope and the endlessly repeating promise of a better future.

I realise that this little story hasn't told you much about what's happening in the community, but I needed to get it off my chest before I could write anything more.  

Just to keep you  in touch with life here,  I've added a few random photos. (I still haven't sought permission to publish photos of people - it's complicated because the simplest way to explain the meaning of a 'blog' is to show them mine!  And that is not simple.)

This is a Gator. They can go everywhere and run on a dime, as they say in the country they come from. They are a big part of life here. They denote status (what ? cars denoting status? how peculiar!) They are the property of the community but are driven by team leaders (groan, even a thousand miles from nowhere I hear that vile term again and again), and Important White People. To be fair, anyone can drive a spare one if they need to. Everyone loves them, except me of course, and everyone seems to want one, both to look cool, feel important and to avoid walking. Sounds a familiar story, eh? 

Gators zap around from early morning till night (the completely unnecessary night patrol) and when you hear the first one of the morning you know it's time to get out of bed. The dogs wait for their owners in them, and they are usually filled with kids. I've got great photos of that of course, but first I have to find out who the kids are, then who their parents are, then explain what the internet is, then what blogging is and what it means..... etc etc. and so for the present you'll have to make do with photos of dogs. Don't know their names. One is Lucky I think.

I prefer these old machines which are dumped outside the mechanic's workshop.

These shadows are not Mimi spirits but us walking to the river after work.

And this is what you look into when you lie on your back in the river.

After having listened for weeks to my anxious agonising about leaving Sydney and coming to live up here, my daughter asked me the other day if I liked it up here. I answered without hesitation that I loved it. Explaining why required more thought. I love the vast  open space, the big red cliffs surrounding this little hub of human and non-human activity, indifferent and timeless. The huge sky, the big sun, the endless stars. And the freedom that comes from this indifferent emptiness.

*         *        *        *

Borroloola and the Rodeo

No photos of Borroloola itself. It isn't a pretty town like Robinson River and it isn't a dry town either- these 2 facts are probably not disconnected, though it's also situated in very flat country- and by the time we got there the morning light was gone and I was feeling hot and lost and grumpy. In that mood, it felt mean spirited to photograph bleakness, and, more to the point perhaps, the place was full of white tourists and I felt like one of them with a camera in my hand. 

The art gallery, Waralungku Arts, was shut on weekends (it has a great website though - www.waralungku.com), and even the town tip was bleak -burned black and smouldering. However, we did find a perfectly good and unburned office chair, with hydraulics working, and a few lengths of copper piping  and fencing wire to add to my collection of Things That Will Surely Come In Handy One Day.  I have been missing my Sydney collection but it hasn't taken long to start another. And a few 5 gallon drums which of course come in handy every day. To make manure tea in, for example, in case you are wondering. (Not tea for me but for the garden.)  

From babies to old people, there are no excretory euphemisms in Robinson River, despite the heroic efforts of the school teachers. One teacher, wanting the requests to change from "Miss, I need a piss/shit" to " I need to go to the toilet", found that her class came up with "Miss I am full for toilet", while holding the belly! (This is the problem with euphemisms- too vague).  When I first arrived, I used the word 'poo' to a group of littlies who wanted to know what I was doing with my bucket and shovel- I told them I was collecting horse poo, as I didn't think they would know the word 'manure'- and they enthusiastically joined in the activity, as the kids here do, each with their own bucket. 
The littlest asked his brother "Wo dat?"                                          
His brother replied "Shit". 
"Wo'fo?" (what for? what's this all about ?) 
 Shrug.   (Translation:- "this new woman is collecting buckets of horse shit and for some reason dog shit won't do even though there's plenty of it. Don't ask".)

Back to the rodeo. Eventually we got there, and it was really fun. The photos tell all- a tiny fraction of all- but after a few hours of sitting in the sun breathing the dust, I'd had enough, so we missed seeing most of the Robinson River mob ride horses and bulls and wrestle calves to the ground. They didn't make the finals, but the Doomadgee rodeo is on next weekend and a lot are going to that too. Doomadgee is in Qld- we are just near the border, but Campbell Newman feels a long way away, thank heavens. 

I was so enthused at my own enthusiasm I bought a blue check Wrangler shirt- well, a cheap knock off, with pink diamantes on the collar and threaded through with gold thread- and was complimented several times when I wore it down the street in RR. I couldn't quite carry the cowboy hat thing off- like the little fellow in the picture below- but I kind of regret not getting the boots as well.

The next three snaps are a series (and I have to attribute all the following photos to Alex, one of the school teachers here. He took them in the late afternoon after we had left)

The next 3 are also a series

And before we left Borroloola we went to the local store and found... CUCUMBERS and reasonably tasty tomatoes (yay!!). You folk with a smorgasbord of choice of what to eat and where and how, may not be able to appreciate the culinary doors that open with a few fresh cucumbers, a couple of reasonably tasty tomatoes, a cup of runny home made yoghurt and some mint of course. I might have sounded a bit deprived foodwise in the first blog but I have come to enjoy the simplicity of it all. So little choice, so much gratitude.

I used to feel most comfortable cooking Mediterranean food but my cooking style is changing to suit the tropics, and inspired by the south east Asian food and produce and plant stalls at the markets in Darwin. If you cook with turmeric, try it fresh. Completely different from dried- no comparison really. Down south you should be able to get it in Asian supermarkets.

*              *                *

The days are getting seriously hot and the humidity is starting to build. I rarely go outside now without covering myself from head to ankle, but I have had to buy some of the work shirts that all the guys here wear - with 50+ sun protection- because I was getting burned through my clothes! In the Dry, every day is the same (perfect) with a cloudless blue sky, and gloriously cool nights, and absolutely not a drop of rain for half the year. But just last night I noticed the eastern sky glowing pink in the sunset. It took me a few minutes to realise that the setting sun was reflecting off clouds! The first clouds to appear since I have been here, and today the sky is flecked with white wisps. This means that the Build Up to the Wet is beginning, and I am getting nervous. But it is a popular time with the locals because the land changes from dry and brown to green and abundant, with lots of food around. The water warms up and the big fish start biting (and so do the crocs, as their metabolism starts to crank up and they begin to think about mating. Well, I daresay there isn't much thinking involved with crocs but they certainly start practising it as the water warms up. Crocs can live as long as humans but their average life expectancy is but a few weeks. They eat each other.)

I find it amusing to think that, because they are cold blooded, these terrifying monsters are rendered semi comatose by water temperature that wouldn't phase a 3 year old human. A bit like the original Daleks being prevented from world domination by a set of stairs. 

My whole garden will need shade cloth pretty soon. Such a change from inner west Sydney where my garden never gets enough sun. By next blog entry I hope it will be photogenic (a bloody horse trampled it last night but everything survived) and you will be entertained with many photos of vegetables. To whet your appetite, here is a sampler from the market garden. I go and admire these little cabbages every day because they are so, well... green!

The sun has just 'gone behind a cloud'. Overcast sky. New experience. 

Till next time.

                                                          Early morning in town.

Well folks, the honeymoon period is over. Reality is beginning to triumph over romantic idealism.
I occasionally feel my heart kick start with the old missionary zeal, but it's fadin' fast (and I'm dropping my 'g's all over the place).

You all know my loathing of platitudes, and I squirm when I say the following, but I cannot think of any other way of saying that Every Day Brings New Challenges, which I only occasionally manage to take in my stride.

Every day something infuriates and outrages me, saddens me, or fills me with despair.  And I realise how strange I find the waters in which I am swimming, or at least trying to stay afloat, when every so often someone will spontaneously smile and engage me in the sort of light inclusive banter that I never realised I needed in the days when I contentedly saw myself as a loner and thought I knew where I was.

The rare "Good morning Sue", ""Hi", "How are you going?", "Settling in?" fill me with  disproportionate happiness.  The male white residents tend to greet me with something like "ya still here?"

Awesome Beauty is still working its magic though, as it always does.

Terms like  'race', 'racism', 'culture', and 'sexism' and 'patriarchy' and 'colonialism' used to trip off my tongue so easily, but now I am living them and they don't trip off my tongue anymore but stay stuck there, glued to my face, gumming up my eyes, and endlessly rattling around my brain trying to escape (to a world where they have never existed or been needed to be brought into being. Cloud Cuckoo Land my parents used to call that place I wanted to live in).  I may be a privileged member of the dominant culture back in Sydney, but here I feel I have some inkling of how it feels to be a migrant or refugee, even though I have not left the country of my birth. Culture shock.

Outside the cosy haven of my little house and relationship, I am being continually confronted, and often affronted, by challenges to my value system and beliefs and ways of behaving and relating, developed and honed over 6o years, to the extent that sometimes I feel I don't know anything, including myself. I suppose that's a Good Thing, spiritually speaking, but it still rattles me horribly. Living in a remote wilderness will do that to you too.

One of the first things to confront me here- and certainly the easiest to talk about- is that everyone sees me as an old woman- badibadi. Terry reassures me that age is respected in Aboriginal culture, but as I am someone who took great pride in my youthful appearance, in a society where youthful looks are valued and old people don't count,  it has knocked me off my perch. Terry very sweetly calls me nyela (girl) in public, which causes merry peals of laughter (what am I missing here?), but at night I find myself reverting to my adolescent anxieties, critically examining my wrinkles and flabby bits in the shaving mirror, ignoring decades of feminism and all that painful work of accepting the ageing process. (My mantra  for years having been "Whatever you think of it, ageing is a vast improvement on the alternative")

This dismantling of my sense of self- to inject a bit of psychological sophistication into this angst- is not helped by the fact that I have no obvious and defined role here. Both spouses of the other white couples here are employed in the community. Except me. I think neither white nor black quite know how to categorise me or relate to me (except the kids who always ask me hopefully where Mr Terry is when they see me, and if he's not around, then I will do to entertain them- with food, my white bathroom, clean toilet, roomy bedroom). I am both invisible and noticeably odd.

I also make myself odd, as a white woman, by walking everywhere, and by being grubby- dirty knees, dirty feet, dirty face, muddy clothes. And I swear, for those of you who haven't noticed.

See what I mean?

So even in this weird collection of eccentric white people who gravitate towards Aboriginal communities- and the lovely young teachers on placement are an exception to this generalisation- I feel like a misfit.

But ...... every evening, and morning if I can get my garden-weary bones out of bed early enough, the beauty here rekindles my fire. On the first morning, I walked outside and the ludicrousness of the idea of private ownership of this country moved from an ideological intellectual position, into my heart. It's easy to idolise private property in the city where it's all compartmentalised and covered in concrete and bitumen and you work your arse off to pay for a fragment of it and pour your heart and soul into making it home, but out here, it's easy to feel that the land owns the people, not the other way round.  And I understand how privileged I am to be living here, on ancient Aboriginal land.

(This is blurry because it was taken from the car)

I long to capture that beauty and preserve it somehow, but my basic point-and-shoot skills haven't yet managed to reproduce the feeling: of the sky gradually growing pale as the horizon glows orange and mauve and turquoise;  while the red dirt glows, and the orange cliffs glow, and the white trunks of the gums glow more intensely in the soft lilac mist of evening, for too short a while before night covers them. The lilac perfectly complementing the grey green foliage of the gums. And the heat of the day also fades in gentle eddies of cool air, starting at foot level and gradually rising as darkness takes over. (I don't know the names of any of the plants here- I can always pick a eucalypt and usually an acacia, and have learnt about the 'rattle pod' tree, and that's about it. And there's lots of tamarinds and mangoes, in flower at present, planted by a previous thoughtful manager).

This photo of a young horse gives a little of the feeling of that misty evening light. 

There's a family of 3 horses that wanders around the town and in the surrounding bush. They find what they can to eat in the dry grass, but they look to be in reasonable condition. No-one seems to ride them, or claim ownership . Lucky for them... unless the cattle station mentality of shooting anything that isn't productive and hasn't been deliberately placed here by the hand of man prevails.  (Another reason to work so hard on the garden!)

(Stop press: a visiting child just told me the horses belong to her dad, who features in a later photo. Another one says that they belong to her brother. Of course! They don't belong to nobody- they belong to everybody. When will I get the hang of communal ownership?)

                      Here they are opposite our house, outside the clinic- taken from our verandah

Last Friday, there was a funeral for a baby who died of SIDS. The first funeral since I have been here, but the third death in the last month. Funerals take ages to organise because all relatives have to come from wherever they are living -and there is no mobile coverage and only white people have private land lines. And most bodies are flown to Darwin and then back again.  Funerals are traditionally really important ceremonies, especially since marriage ceremonies are non-existent, except amongst the few missionary-influenced Christians.

Cars and trucks were driving people in all Thursday but on Friday morning the place was eerily quiet- the bustle of vehicles normally starts about 7 am, but no one was going to work. Then about midday the wailing started. It sounded like the whole community was wailing together. I was sitting on the verandah thinking about the baby and her parents but there was so much pain and grief in that wailing that I couldn't tolerate listening. I felt I would crack apart.

In the afternoon, we walked to the store at the other end of town and noticed groups of adolescents, talking and giggling and flirting, and realised that we never normally see them here. They mostly go off to boarding school in Darwin or Alice Springs, but they are always brought back for funerals. And they seem in no hurry to go back. Each house, all of them overcrowded to begin with, seems to have doubled or tripled its normal population, with tents spreading onto the oval and huge circles of people sitting around fires. The house where the baby died was particularly noisy, and had at least ten little kids jumping on the trampoline in the front yard.

And most visitors are staying around for the social event of the year... the Borroloola Rodeo, one of the last genuine local bush rodeos in the country.  Borroloola is the nearest town, 150 kms away along a rough dirt road.  The rodeo's on next weekend and the excitement has been building up all week,  the shop selling out of Wrangler shirts, country music blaring out louder than ever, and everyone wearing those ten gallon hats. Today I saw a toddler wandering along wearing nothing but a nappy and her dad's ten gallon hat down to her shoulders.

All the ringers- the guys who work with the cattle- who are entering the competitions have been practising their riding every evening and here they are starting off at the back of our place.

Curtis, Victor, Kyle. And Lucky.

                         And building up to a gallop past our neighbour's house. Plus Lucky.


The town is very quiet today, with those people without roadworthy vehicles-  the majority- going to Borroloola in the community 'troopie' (troop carrier) over the last 2 days. The store is shut and the roads empty. We're leaving early tomorrow. As well as a rodeo, Borroloola has a hardware shop, an art gallery and a fabulous tip. I'll be like a pig in mud. (Dirty knees and face, swears like a trooper, and furnishes the house by scavenging at the tip!)

*             *             *

Thanks for the offers of food parcels. I felt like I was living in war time London! I would kill for some little cucumbers and  cherry tomatoes from the Tamil farmers at the Orange Grove markets, but the food situation has improved. Or I am getting used to it. The seedlings are starting to uncurl their little green heads, so I am feeling hopeful - bugger off horses!- and, well, what's wrong with cabbage anyway? AND the community nurse, who lives opposite, brought over a big handful of mint from her garden! 

The thing about mint, for me at least, is that its taste triggers the memory of all the fresh green crunchy things I love eating which have mint in them, and my brain fills in the gap. Sort of. 

I have discovered that you can use cabbage like green paw paw, and green paw paw salad is one of the best foods in the world. In the manner of all good blogs, and undoubtedly many a crappy one too, here is the recipe:-

Finely chop cabbage- red and green make a pretty mixture- and grated carrot. Add crushed garlic and lots of finely chopped mint and chopped roasted peanuts and some finely chopped chillies. And tomatoes. 
Mix the following dressing in:-

The juice from 1-2 limes, a few dashes of fish sauce (without the DDT preferably), and some sugar (traditionally palm sugar, but any sugar will do - I found this amazing sugar in Darwin made from coconut blossoms, which is not very sweet). It will taste vile and make your toes curl, because fish sauce tastes vile, but you need to get the balance of sweet and sour and salty and pungent right so you have to taste it. 

No measurements, go by taste and appearance, and it can be infinitely adjusted according to what you have in the cupboard. If you have one of those big wooden pestles that paw paw salad is made in, you can use that, but leaving it to stand for a while, for the tastes to meld together, works well too.

                                                              *             *             *

Finally, the mandatory croc mention. 

We went for a swim in this beautiful spot. It managed to be beautiful despite the dollops of cow shit, the disposable nappy, plastic water bottle, and empty tuna can on the banks. 

Standing on the bank, I asked Terry as usual "Are there crocs here?"

And he said "Look how clear the water is, you can see the bottom" In other words, don't worry, you can see it coming?? (you can even see the bottom in the photo). "Anyway, the locals say there are no crocs here."

I said, proud of my new croc spotting knowledge "And there are no slides!"

And he said "Well I saw a slide here the other day, but it was only a small one" (In other words, it was only a small croc)

And, folks, I went in.  


Till next time (after the rodeo). Yeeeehaarrrrr !!!!

robinson river diary

No grog No gunja. My kinda town.

Tuesday August 7th.

I've been here a week and have been waiting for my emotions to settle so I can sit down and write. 

Each day here has walloped me with tenderness, strangeness, sadness, awesome beauty, grief, indignation and moral outrage (no change there, then), shame, guilt, anger, frustration, compassion, alienation, hopelessness and eagerness. I have thrown myself into, paradoxically, a frenzy of all my familiar settling activities - making a garden, listening to Radio National (now I know what live streaming is), walking, cooking, kneading bread, cutting vegetables into very small pieces and generally attempting to be a Domestic Goddess. I probably should be spending more time sitting round talking about nothing in particular with a bunch of people I don't know very well, preferably over a cup of tea, while looking off into the distance, or staring at the ground. Relationships are what matters here. But you know how difficult I find all that. I always like doing stuff.

The garden is actually a necessity,  cabbages costing over $7 in the community store, and no other shops for hundreds of miles. Fifty Interesting Ways to Prepare a Quarter Cabbage ($4, and imported from Victoria). The carrots are packed in Lidcombe(NSW)! Food miles be buggered, eh, out here in the bush. Of course, the river is full of fish and crocodiles and turtles and yabbies,  and the bush is equally full of tucker, but everybody is so busy training (white fellas) or being trained (black fellas) -more about  the aboriginal training industry at a later date- and trying to turn this community into a farming community (more about that later too), there doesn't seem to be a lot of time to catch any food. Except weekends, or not coming back after lunch, or simply bunking off work. (More about the CDEP economy in remote communities at a later date too). And probably not enough of bush tucker to support 250 people anyway. 

I may have to overcome my distaste for killing things and do my own catching, although I draw the line at wallabies. And other furry things. It used to be that I didn't eat beings with faces. Now, it's perhaps those with legs. Except crocodiles- I won't be catching those though, and I hope they don't catch me.

The fresh food from Darwin is fast running out.  Ah.. tomatoes, ah... mint, ah.... little crisp cool crunchy cucumbers, ah ........ tabbouli.


First of all.. the awesome beauty. Just landscape in this posting. It's simpler than people- you don't have to work out the complications of honestly asking permission of people who aren't familiar with the internet, let alone blogging.

The Mighty Robinson River

The kids swim in here, but we are too scared. Or sensible or cautious (or missing out on a bloody good swim!). It's deep enough to hide a croc but the banks are too steep for the them to crawl out and there are no slides in the sand (where they drag themselves in and out of the water) . The locals know where the big crocs live and reckon there aren't any in this stretch of the river. All the same, I know I'd have a heart attack every time my feet touched a branch under water.* 

This is where we 'swim' (in a manner of speaking)

It's shallow and burbling over rocks and fr-e-e-zing. That will be very welcome when the weather 'warms up', as they say up here.  It's already close to 30 degrees on most days!

*Since this is a Northern Territory blog, I'm sure there will be many a croc mention. Just to remind you southerners how tough we are up here and how much danger we face on a daily basis.

This is Lubba Lubba.

It is the big hill behind the town. Going up there reminds me of Picnic at Hanging Rock, so if i disappear one day,  that's probably where you won't find me. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some serious spirit life up there. The locals don't seem to go there and the kids  asked Terry to take them there, presumably feeling protected by white people's lack of belief in spirits.

But this is why we go there...

and this (on a day when the sky was full of smoke)

and this

You know you are in a small isolated community (180 km from Borrooloola and 800km from Katherine) when everybody knows who is in the only plane in the sky. 

It's too hot to go up there except late afternoon, to watch the sunset, or early morning, to watch the sunrise (I've haven't managed that one so far).

The walk up and back is also beautiful.

Enough. It has taken me 2 days to deal with this much technology. Time to fix the holes in the chooks' nesting boxes before the eggs fall through.  See ya later.