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!)
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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.
* * * *
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 ................
