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.