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!)

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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.

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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 !!!!