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.