A glimpse at the life of a housesitter

 

It’s with a sense of elation that I move into the large, old house on the hill.  Set on 10 acres, there are also two separate, unoccupied cabins, in prime positions on the land.  They are former Bed and Breakfast guest accommodation, untenanted since the height of the pandemic.  It’s virtually impossible for my mind to leave alone the subject that preoccupies me almost constantly these days: privilege versus homelessness.  It’s personal!

 

I have the run of the property, and am looking forward to five weeks of uninterrupted bliss.  How hard can looking after two cavoodles be?

 

The first hiccup to life in paradise becomes apparent at the end of the first day.  The oven won't ignite.  Wondering if the gas is low, and finding the bottles, I deduce one is virtually empty, so switch them over.  Via a WhatsApp conversation with the owner in the UK, I’m rebuked, and told to switch them back.  The oven is temperamental, he explains. I'm given a ten-minute virtual lesson on how to light an oven; the mansplaining is astonishing.  I refrain from sharing my 40+ years’ experience of maintaining house and garden!  There’s a portable electric oven in the cabin, go fetch it, he directs.  Baking malfunction, averted!

  

It doesn’t take long before I’m feeling routinely and perversely annoyed.  The theme this time is sleep!  I’m a cow when I don’t get enough of it.  I’ve been informed the dogs like to sleep a la human, on the bed.  Their fetching preamble before retiring is to jump on the bed, and scratch the bejesus out of the doona.  To the extent they’ve now scratched ragged holes in it.

Gus, 13 years old, deaf as a doornail, one-eyed, and with a growth the size of a tennis ball projecting from his side, is surprisingly less needy than Peggy who is 3. She insists on not exactly lying on top of me, but lying so desperately and tightly close that she might as well be a tumour extending from my chest.  I’m not humoured.  The reality is I haven’t shared my bed with anyone of note for decades, and I’m not about to relinquish my precious sleep for anyone, let alone two by four hairy legs! I lie fitfully wide awake for hours, plotting not only how I’m going to cope with this for five weeks, but how to relax into it.  In the morning I receive a message from Mr UK. How did you sleep? No point in lying I figure, so I respond ‘in stages’.  The response is empathic, but the alternative is not.  It’s suggested I leave them in the frigid 19^th century kitchen, and block the door with a stool and the vegetable rack to stop them from scratching it to death.  I let them howl for about an hour, my head under the pillow, under the doona, deep breaths, lalalala, etc.  It’s no use. It was never remotely possible for me to leave my babies to cry.  I consider it a form of abuse. They’re back on the bed in a blink.  Suck it up, housesitter!

A few days later, the maximum I can tolerate being alone with two dogs minus the sight of another human, I bundle the pooches into the car and head to Brunswick Heads beach.  I recall distant advice to the effect the dogs are exercised on the land, where they have free run of the vast acreage. It’s not till later that I realise this is code for the dogs are unaccustomed to being on a leash.  At Brunswick Heads I fasten their harnesses, and set off.  Within 5 minutes, their leashes look like a synthetic version of my plait; a matted, knotty crisis, a criss-cross of entanglement.  They’re strong dogs, and I’ve become less strong as the years roll on. The walk is a nightmare, it's impossible to contain their boundlessness. They continue to twist themselves into knots and jump around like delinquents.  If the force of their combined muscle wasn’t pulling my arm out of its socket, I’d almost laugh. I haven’t slept well.  I’m cranky.  Their unruly, erratic, never-been-to-the-beach-before type behaviour is too much for me, and we return to the car. I feel like a frazzled 70-year old mother with twin toddlers. 

 

Barely a week has passed. I take what's left of the white wine out of the fridge, the remainder of the bottle Mr UK and I shared the evening before he left, and take a large gulp.  Turning the music up loud, I begin grating turmeric for the jamu, all the while thinking of Mary Leunig and her famous cartoon that includes a grater.  Look it up! I throw the grater into the sink and begin old person dancing while the dogs gaze at me with confused disinterest.  When all else fails ... 

A few days later, I awaken to the sound of what can only be described as a loud, watery, breathy growl.  I follow the noise to its source. The water feature out the back door is having a seizure.  I take a sound recording and hit send.  Back comes the advice: unplug the pump, leave it off.  I look for the pump, and locate a serious looking vessel around the corner.

 

    

 In hinsight, it's obviously way too big for a water feature pump 

 

Following the leads to the switch, I apply a series of mini tugs.  Nothing. Feeling completely out of my depth, and annoyed (again) at Mr UK’s lack of detail, I send a pic of the vessel and enquiry; which lead? He rings.  With thinly veiled panic, he asks whether I’ve turned off the water to the house? I've disconnected nothing, I respond, with as much buddha in my voice as I can muster.  Equilibrium restored.

 

Interruption number five comes in the form of the ancient combustion fireplace.  I’m told the house is over 100 years old; the fireplace most likely isn’t that old, but it’s certainly a relic of another era. The volume of rust fragments that eventually begin raining out of it attests to this.  At first, something in the structure of the beast begins to bend and warp, and it becomes difficult to open and close the door without manipulating the grille.  A couple of days later, the grille collapses. In its death throes, it is left to dangle by the air vent handle. I now need three hands to work it.  I phone a friend, a neighbour who happens to know the owner.  I'm vulnerable, and beginning to feel my juju is all wrong.  It takes strength of will to convince myself that I’m the not the cause of all the breakdowns. Friend reassures me owners only fix things ‘when they’re broken’. The entire vent from the fireplace is removed.   For the remainder of my stay, the ballroom-sized loungeroom needs all seven doors leading outside opened to save my lungs from collapsing due to smoke inhalation.  Is the fire smoking? Mr UK asks when he receives a report from friend.  Yeah, all great, I respond! There’s only so much whingeing you can do.

Poor old broken ancient being

 

But wait, there's more.

 

Scarcely a day later, I put a load of washing in the large, industrial-looking dryer located in the three-walled shed in the back yard. When I return two hours later, the wet mass of clothes lies at the bottom of the drum.  I turn it on again.  It fires up, and within 20 seconds, emits a high-pitched shriek, and stops.  I’ve killed the dryer as well. I want to cry.

 

Three weeks down, two to go. I’m beginning to wish out!

 

In my depleted state of being, I contract covid, and with as much effort as I can muster, withdraw from ‘doing’. Building myself a nest of a hundred cushions and lying in front of the fire, the dogs finally stop too.  Because in fact, that’s all they want to do, lie down and nap the day long. I have difficulty stopping; it’s genetic! When you’re forced to stop moving, and rest, the world takes on a radically different hue. The heart rests at a different frequency, the sky turns blue, all manner of colour and vigour enter your vision, and the camilias and magnolia burst into bloom. 

 

 

Within a week of my convalescence, the dogs begin dragging their sorry arses across the now-not-so-lovely kilims in the bedroom.  Whether it's irritated gland syndrome or worms, it's gross. Mr UK‘s remedy: a wad of kitchen roll and a dab of washing up liquid! No, it’s unlikely to be worms, he says.  They’re smelly as fuck; can I bathe them? No, same treatment, a wad of kitchen paper … if they’ve rolled in something green and slimy, get the outdoor hose onto them.  But it’s a two person job.  Good luck! 

I’m verging on not caring anymore. One week to go ...

One day in the last week, I notice, not for the first time, the large mound of ginger mushrooming out of the soil off the deck at the front door. It's desperate for harvesting, I think. Wielding a large garden fork, on the first day, I yield about a kilo and a half of ginger root.  I repeat the process the next couple of days. It’s obvious it hasn’t been reaped in years, the roots are a layered and twisted mess of years of growth. A not insubstantial portion of it is ruined; untended for too long. On the grass, under the noon day sun, I pelt it with the hose, five kgs of it.  It’s labour intensive, especially the intricate scrubbing of the hard to get to places like the knees and elbows and other skin folds of the root. 

    

 

I send this image and an enthusiastic text to Mr UK, with the bold suggestion that I can put aside a couple of kgs for he and his wife, and donate a couple of kgs to Liberation Larder in Byron Bay, the organisation that feeds hundreds of homeless people each week. Hours later my joy at what I thought was a good deed, has the thrill deflated.  ‘Have you left any in the ground?’  Oho! ‘There’s plenty in the ground’ I respond, with a partial stretch of the truth.  I do in fact return the spoilt bits to the soil, aware that some of them will shoot, but they won't be ready for a while.‘We use it every day in our juice’ he continues. I experience a sharp stab in the chest; my inner child has been rejected, is feeling wronged, again.  ‘I’ll freeze it’ I offer. 

  

My mistake was not asking!  With an apology for acting spontaneously, I send an image of their first jonquil for the season. 

 

Housesitting can be so much fun ... if you've got the skin of a crocodile!

Hypoglossus

No, I’d never heard of it either.  Sounds like a lipstick brand, a low gloss version for the retiring type. Of which I am not! 

  

Apologies in advance for the scientific image.  Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have been very happy with an image of my tongue. The hypoglossus muscle (from Greek: hypo – under, and glossa – tongue) enables the tongue’s movement.  It supports speech and swallowing, and moves substances around the mouth.

 The red bit is the hypoglossus

The hypoglossal nerve (CNXII) is the tongue’s motor; it gives the tongue its energy and action.  When the nerve is damaged, it affects your capacity to articulate words, causing slurring and sluggish speech, can trigger choking, and makes the process of manipulating food around your mouth, like steak, really fucking hard.   Food that once had a face, and is generally red and muscular and striated, has become a thing of terror! 

On that note, while tucking into some pumpkin soup two years ago, my daughter Pia said to me ‘Mum, what’s going on with your speech?’.  In true motherly fashion, I shrugged, and flew to Italy.  The rest is history.  I’m still awaiting a diagnosis.  The more I ask Doctor Google about hypo things of the mouth and tongue, the deeper I dive into the rabbit hole and the more anxious I become.  But I’ve become a research whiz, and have a mountain of manila folders containing research papers from China to Turkey to the USA. Although MRIs have ruled out my having a stroke, in China, when a stroke patient suffers dysarthria (weakness of the tongue) they are immediately subject to acupuncture of the tongue.   What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so I gave it a go, every day for weeks, based solely on the research and a wee bit of practitioner coercion.  Success rate, zero. 

 

So I wait. And get on with life.  I’ve become an older woman who spends hours thinking about her health, and an inordinate amount of time sitting in medical waiting rooms, playing solitaire on my device. The narrow road to the deep south of the 21^st century’s broken medical system, where specialists and receptionists triage the acute over the chronic - rightly so - life is akin to sitting at the shelter outside a nursing home waiting for the bus. 

 

A woman’s tongue is one of her crucial muscles, and assets.  It enables her to have a voice in a man’s world.  Assists her to speak truth to power, have agency, and poke it out in defiance.  The applications of the tongue are astonishing.  Of the 7 trillion nerves in the human body, it takes less than a handful of them to take leave of their senses and for all hell to break loose. 

 

In the meantime, and in my current and enduring position as house-sitter extraordinaire, wiling away the hours in social and intellectual exchange has fallen by the wayside and been substituted with tongue licking and tail wagging.  I've never owned a dog in my life. Dogs are all bounce, eyes and dynamism.  I’ve become adept at reading their body language, while sitting on the fence or in the garden or on the couch gazing into the beyond, paw to hand, contemplating this one mysterious life. Dogs aren't interested in my health or my words, only my companionship.  It’s soul-saving. 

 

Here’s a small selection of my charges.   Thank you to them all.

 Huxley

 

 

Rupert, satiated after tacos! 

Charlie, the dignified old gentleman

Peggy (who said camera?) & Gus

Last but not least, Romeo

 

 

Nostalgia as antidote

 

 

The Perversi and Ongarello clans. Mid 1960s

A who’s who of trouble. Can you spot me?

 

According to the World Health Organisation, those above 65 are considered elderly.  As an elder therefore, I have time on my hands, lots of it, time to indulge in romanticising the past. Cosseting the past couldn’t be described as a trustworthy pursuit, that would be a fantasy.  It’s more a constructed way-it-used-to-be partial unreliable memory, partial imaginary feel-good narrative. I guess it doesn’t require truth. Just rose-coloured glasses! It’s claimed one’s pain perception is lowered through indulging in nostalgia.

 

Today, nostalgia is not so much defined as lived. It has become an antidote to technology, a literal raison d’etre.  Particularly, in this instance, for the elderly.

 

It’s not that I long for the good old days.  Neither do I wish to idealise it; it was different, hard. We were less evolved. Perhaps naïve.  We smoked lots of ‘safe’ cigarettes, drove while pissed, suffered the patriarchy, were oblivious to trauma conditions, the scorching sun, and chemicals and sprays.  Climate change and the ozone layer were conditions that existed in the ether, or not at all.   We even managed to overlook creepy Rolf Harris.

 

I remember the past as somewhat more simplified. We weren’t distracted or consumed by technology, artificial intelligence, scam calls, hackers, stranger danger. We went bush, or drank to forget.  We hadn’t yet been introduced to the production of synthetic embryos, deep fakes and killer drones. We had lots of sex. Well, some people did.  To be fair, I didn’t spend much time reading newspapers.  I was too busy making stuff, partying, working, house renovating and parenting. Not necessarily in that order.

 

Back then we didn’t slam our fist on the fuck-you litigious button to extract financial revenge when someone did us wrong.  We took responsibility, or got angry.  I recently admitted to my acupuncturist I was tormented by it.  His response: ‘still?’ I felt a stab of shame. Only a man would say that to a woman! It remains unfashionable amongst the patriarchy for women to display anger.  Anger energises, sharpens the mind, allows you to let off steam, and gives creativity a boost. It can also make you sick.

 

Largely, as someone inclined toward intensity and sorrow, emotions that share space with a hot temper - go figure - remembering more simple times and the calming feeling of nostalgia, is medicine. Fabrication, or not. Having had my joy factor and pleasure principle overlooked as a small child, nostalgia provides me with enough juju to maintain a sense of personal order, to put on a happy face. I’m drawn to serious people and serious conversation. My tribe. I lay the entire blame for this on my astrological natal chart: Scorpio by four! Due to this, I need more Hare Krishna devotees to cross my path, minus the covert misogyny naturally.  Wearing cheerful, colourful saris, and banging cymbals, a kind of whoop whoop abandon written over their faces, I’m often transfixed by their sight, their real or imaginary inner hosanna.  The sight of their slow procession and their noisy clangers is an event sure to raise my dopamine levels, charm a smile into existence.

 

But seriously, (sorry, not sorry), give me a hit of wistful yearning for the past any day, a sentimentality washed in indistinct sepia tones. Give me just a moment’s return to too-heavy make-up, mini-skirts and fuck-me boots. Disco balls, barrels of riesling, outrageous wedges and stilettos, and Farrah Fawcett hair. Give me hot days in the garden with annoying sisters by four and the even more annoying cousins, mostly boys.  The power of our collective energy, the vibrational delight of singing together, the innocence, the mischief-making and collecting dandelion flowers from the side of the road, destined for neighbourly mothers in exchange for sweets.  Trips to the mountains, backpacking through South East Asia, drive-in cinemas and the crimson Valiant.  Green ginger wine, the smell of jonquils and pine trees, the rolling hills of Diamond Creek, and the winding Yarra River.  The melancholic baritone of Leonard Cohen, his poetry and music.  I don’t want to go back to it all, but the charisma of remembering invokes a feeling of belonging, somehow more real, more wholesome.

 

There’s no substitute for reminiscence, especially an account that excludes trauma. There is no stand-in for the meeting of eyes, the touch of a tender hand on your arm.  I identify with the philosopher Simone Weil when she says ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. It can’t be replicated with a device. Paying attention to each other, and the feeling of homesickness is a remedy for a world obsessed with smart phones and gadgets.

 

You can’t stop change.  I wouldn’t want to; I actually thrive on it. This medium-level ache for yesteryear could be a desire to escape, preparation for death, or just a natural pastime that aids examining regret and remorse in order to make amends with the past before it’s too late.  It’s a good thing, right?

 

Be like the tree

 

 

A Welcome to Warburton sign on the outskirts of town it is not. For more than one reason. Firstly, the forest is a big drawcard, one of the chief reasons I’m here. Secondly, the words ‘forest’ and ‘closed’ in the same sentence? I’m sorry, they simply don’t belong together.  Myer closes, so do servos, sometimes. Forests don’t! Or shouldn’t. I’m not going for a coffee or a three-pack of new socks. I’m here to hike, in nature.

 

I’ve escaped the city for a week’s R & R.  I can already feel my muscles soften. The ground is a carpet of red, gold and orange autumn leaves. The green contours of the land evoke the topography of the Northern Rivers, the earthy smell of decay a familiar reminder. The babbling Yarra River, meandering, rewards my frayed senses, confers the gentle pause my body longs for.   

 

But this forest closed business can’t be for real. When I check out Mrs Google, I see the bridge over the Yarra River leading to the forest is under reconstruction.  It’s the only vehicular access to the forest.  Wading through the river is an option, but I’d have to have my head read.   I must find a way to the forest. The images of the towering redwoods on the web lend strength and immediacy to the lure in my bones. I recognise this urgent, bracing call, this unambiguous audacity I’m certain I’ve carried for lifetimes.

 

I’ve heard there’s a path high in the mountains.  It’s an old maintenance track built to support an aqueduct that in 1911 was constructed to supply water to the greater City of Melbourne.  Today it’s a hiking trail, a 32 km return trip that takes you close to the forest. I’ll pedal.  

 

Mr Bike Man is patient, and not bad on the eye. Reciting the 5000-word Operation Manual and Book of Expected Behaviour for Novice E-Bike Riders, he stops occasionally to establish my comprehension; I nod, thinly.  Inside, my anxiety reaches new heights.  He then proceeds to show me the route on a very small map – gates to negotiate, steep slippery inclines that require me to walk the bike, crossings of main roads, forks on the path.  I’ve absorbed about 10% of the whole delivery. I come within an eyelash of quitting.  

 

The reward is the route. It traverses great stands of mountain ash and walls of tree ferns. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos wail and sweep across the path ahead of me.  The glorious sun is out, and my wobbly arms are getting furiously itchy from the increased blood flow and vibration of a 22 kg bike doing around 12 km an hour on an uneven path.  Within ten minutes, I’m a pro.

 

On first sight of the forest, the words of the exiled Vietnamese master, Thich Nhat Hanh, sound in my head; ‘I have arrived.  I am home’. I am awe-struck; don’t know whether to walk, sit, or stand. I reach my hand to the forest floor; its spongy, yielding layer is damp.  Around my feet a dozen different species of fungi sprout.  I crouch and examine the bionetwork of colourful fungus.  Some serious psilocybin going on here. 

 

 

 

But it is the largesse of the scene before me that renders me dumb. 

 

 

This enchantment and involuntary hijacking of my sensory field imbues a rush I’m unable to process.  I close my gaping mouth, quieten the need to do something.  Entering a forest of this scope is akin to crossing a threshold into a marginal place of otherness.   Something transcendent happens. The usual direction of my thoughts to the inner field does a one-eighty.  The pores of my skin unzip and open to the throb of the woodland as though they’ve set eyes on a dear old lost friend. I’ve been mourning my absence from the forest, and the strange thing is, I’ve barely even noticed it happen.  I gaze up, and see, not for the first time, the evidence of what Jane Hirshfield, poet and Zen practitioner refers to as ‘blind optimism’.  Here she is referring to the ability of trees to sightlessly trust the primal gravitational pull of the species to orient to the light.  It is the original act of fidelity to life itself.  The interdependence of the ecosystem here is so obvious and breathtaking, a symbiotic smorgasbord of co-operation and growth. I am undone.

 

 

Every so often, an artist by the name of David Digapony, spends a day in the forest, collects the fallen branches that project vertically off the trunk of the Redwood, and sculpts the timber into forms of beauty.  These forms are scattered throughout the forest.

 

Fourteen hundred Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) occupy this plantation, a non-native species of the cypress family originating in California.  Sequoia sempervirens is among the tallest, widest, and oldest living trees on the planet.  With enough water and nutrients this species is known to live for 3000 years.  In the drought-ridden climate conditions of today, these statistics no longer apply.  The trees now form part of the Yarra Ranges National Park, and are a major tourist attraction.  How lucky am I to have had the park to myself?

 

 

                Unruly, black sheep Sequoia by the river in the township

 

I want to be more like a tree.  To trust in seasons of change, move to the rhythms of the cycles of life, urge my frail human heart to have faith in the shifting landscape of time.

 

 

 

 

A day at a time

                                 

This was my Macpac, before I stupidly sold it some months ago. I was having a serious cull before moving out.  In the high stakes game of moving, I erroneously thought my travel days were over. Dumb! The backpack is synonymous with travel, freedom and adventure. In an era of the political, climate and capitalism refugee however, the humble backpack has adopted a new profile.  The Backpack Bed© has arrived, a waterproof, fire retardant, environmentally friendly home away from home. For the homeless.

 

This makes me angry, and sad.  I’ve been both these things a lot lately.  Because I too am now homeless. Is a Backpack Bed the best society can do? 

 

Being homeless could be the new black, especially in Melbourne where I'm currently located, but it’s most definitely the new norm.  It barely raises an eyebrow.  It’s a global crisis, women of my age its main target. It’s an utter disgrace. Fortunately, there are philanthropists out there, changing the face of the diabolical housing emergency, one dollar at a time.  There are also new laws creeping into town planning departments in local governments that are giving green lights to tiny houses and eco-villages and multiple occupancy land-sharing arrangements.  This may be good for the future, but in the meantime?  I recall feminists in the 70s advocating for and building refuges for women escaping domestic abuse so they didn’t end up on the streets.  Father Bob Maguire, bless the depth of his now deceased soul, also cared, and acted. Stirred by his distress at witnessing his father’s violence towards his mother in his early life, he spent his life supporting street kids, the disadvantaged and the homeless.  If you don’t know somebody who’s experiencing housing stress, you’re either not asking the right questions or living with your head in the sand.  We can’t leave this whole sorry mess to the government.  They're suffering blind paralysis. We need to do something but I feel powerless to know what, save for promoting organisations campaigning on behalf of the needy.  Like Womens Village Collective.  We need to rally together to make a difference.  I need hope!

 

So, Melbourne! City of my birth, culturally and artistically rich one minute, cold and bleak the next.  Over the years I've loved Melbourne from a distance; a two week stay is generally my limit.  Too much concrete, too smelly, too busy, too noisy.  I miss the green curves of home.  It's now three months, but feels like six. Housesitting, minding other people’s pets, camping, and wearing out my welcome at the homes of family and friends, wearing down their moods and wearing myself thin with anxiety.  Every day I scan the rentals and sub-lets on social media and community pages.  I’m competing with thousands. You have to be quick; they’re gone in a flash.  My impulses have slowed.  I read, write, walk, cook, try to be helpful and attempt to invoke the voice of my higher self.  I’m doing my best. 

 

Not having a home isn’t easy to talk about.  Too much awfulness inside bamboozles the mind and strangles rationality.  Hungry ghosts descend, whirling through your energy field, driving the intense emotional needs further down, strangling insight and calm. Attachments to early trauma and dysfunctional adult behavioural patterns re-emerge. I unconsciously become seriously judgy - of myself, and others.  Unkind thoughts surface, run laps around my consciousness as though there’s some grand prize on offer at the end. Thoughts like well, if you hadn’t travelled overseas last year, and done that big road trip around Australia the year before, perhaps you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in now.  Perhaps if you’d bought a house years ago when they were more affordable you wouldn’t be in this position today.  Look at the lifestyle you’ve led! (fuck off Tony Abbott). Maybe if you’d looked after your declining mental health decades ago, you’d be more secure now.  I’ve even fallen into the trap of believing it’s all my fault.  I have to remind myself it’s not.  I’m not sure if I believe this narrative, or not.  It’s the fault of a sick system, I know this.  A system (see government) that fails to invest adequately in social housing, fails to support women fleeing family violence, fails to pay the underclass sufficient to live on. 

 

See what I mean? Judgy as fuck, an inheritance from my folks, the original judge and jury. It’s a difficult mantle to throw off, and in times of need, my neuroses step up like obedient little soldiers, conditioned to attack. They don’t wait for a second invite. Let’s go ride the Shame and Loathing Wheel.  But the humiliation of not having a safe place to lay your head at night is real.  I’ve been very unsocial, preoccupied and irritable.  The day in and day outness of having to rely on others for support and there being no light at the end of the tunnel is tough to live with. An itch that doesn’t go away. The worst sort of homesickness.

 

I drive into the rain, my metaphorical backpack bed's contents strewn untidily across the back of my car. 

 

It feels like 8 pm but it’s only 4.00.  I have no idea where I’m heading.  But I have my fleecy boots, my feathered sleeping bag, and my intuition is on high alert, scoping out the coastal road and its parks, one semi-arc of the wiper blades after another.

The rock of otherness

 

As a child, I had an Aboriginal friend.  I don’t remember her name. We were both day students at St Catherine’s Girls’ Orphanage in Geelong in the late 50s. It must have been a conveniently located school/child disciplinary centre, as I was not an orphan. In my mind’s eye I can still see the well-to-do home where my friend lived.  In adulthood, when I realised my friend must have been part of the Stolen Generation, I felt sad, and sick.    I remember her as quiet, warm, and kind.  I feel like crying.

 

Cut to Alice Springs June 2021.  My sister Margaret and I have been to the Tip Shop for an exhibition of recycled sculptural pieces, and have ventured into town for a drink.  We wander in and out of a couple of venues before passing The Rock Bar.  The large windows on both sides of the door present a view inside.  Immediately obvious is the fact the place is full of Indigenous people. I’m instantly taken aback.  I’ve never seen a pub with only Indigenous people inside, like never in my life. 

 

‘Evening ladies!’ the white guy at the door ventures as we pass.  We nod, grin, and keep walking.  Within a few strides, I stop. ‘Shall we go back?’ I want in. I want to unsee colour. We stall for a minute, Margaret slightly more hesitant, and head back. 

 

‘Coming in?’ the same guy asks, a wide smile creasing his animated face.  He walks us to the bar, and stays close for a few minutes.  He’s looking after us, I muse, aware of a creeping discomfort in my bones.  Our whiteness attracts an intense gaze.  I’m seen.  This is ironic because I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking about this very subject, the importance of being seen, and heard. During my travels in the past five months, I’ve felt othered.  Being single and travelling roads traversed by mainly couples I’ve felt excluded from conversation, excluded from the status quo, ignored. 

 

This is different though. I’m seen in circumstances where I feel I don’t belong. 

 

We’re escorted out the back where a crowd of a couple of hundred people are dancing enthusiastically to an upbeat Aboriginal band, MB Reggae. They’re good. Apart from the guy on the sound desk, we’re the only whites out here as well.  Although I’m barely seeing outside my own uneasiness, I feel a probing gaze that unsettles and unnerves me.

 

It’s not long before a woman approaches us, puts her arm around my shoulders.  We bob along to the sounds.  A couple more women approach us, their sociability reassuring.   I pull out my tobacco pouch to roll a smoke, and offer it, the women taking a pinch, rolling it in the palm of their hands and placing it in their mouths.   Tooth to jowl, the crowd whoops and cheers, their fists raised, their solidarity compelling. 

 

But all is not well within.  A couple of times I look around.  The mob is eighty per cent men, many dancing, many holding up the walls.  The feeling of scrutiny creates a terrible discordance.  I’m at sea, unable to reconcile my intuitive sense we don’t belong, are unwelcome. I feel a hand on my arm and turn.  A woman catches me off guard, whispers in my ear. ‘… men rape … you’re not safe’.  I look her in the eye, see her upset, her insistence.  She is protecting us.  ‘Go home.’ She repeats, over and over. 

 

So this is what othering feels like. A particularly insidious, too-common characteristic of the world we live in. 

 

Stepping outside my comfort zone has had a positive effect though. My empathy has grown muscle, given voice to that part of me that feels for and cares about the lived experience of the marginalised, and vulnerable.     

 

I wanted to not see colour.  Who was I kidding?  Sixty years on from my childhood experience, the awful reality of division continues. 

 

 

The Gibb aka Testosterone Theme Park

 

With a once in a lifetime opportunity arising to spend time with my sister Margaret from Hobart and daughter Pia from Brisbane in Alice Springs in June/July, two options were available to get there. More bitumen, or dirt.  Having spent excessive weeks on bitumen in the past month, like thousands of kms of it, in Broome I began to seriously consider the Gibb River Road, challenging every sensible conclusion I’d previously entertained about the reality of gravel roads, the stamina it entailed, and the suffocating dust.  Not to mention my relatively constant anxiety about the reliability of my rig and what the fuck happens if I bust a tyre or suspension, or shatter the windscreen with no mobile reception?    

 

At the caravan park I approached a number of people with red dust on their vehicles.  The first was a woman.  Her husband was out of earshot!  I often find women’s perspectives vary enormously from that of men.  The road was shit, she offered with creased brow, the corrugation shit, the hours long, the tension to the body exhausting.  We screwed the shockers on our 4 X 4 caravan, she said with raised eyebrows.   Right, I thought, that’s that! No fucking way. 

 

Some hours later I ventured out again.  This time I spoke to a guy.  Whilst he considered the road ‘poor’ he brought his map over to my site and together we studied the rivers and waterholes that traverse the road.  I found my mindset shift.  As a water sign in astrological terms, the enthusiasm he expressed for the gorges and waterfalls and swimming holes had a weighty and positive effect on me. My mind did a 180-degree pivot.

 

On the morning of my departure, unsure of correct tyre pressure I was directed to another camper, an engineer who’d also just completed the crossing.  ‘Good strong rig you’ve got there’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine’.  His assurances were medicine to my mind.  Slow down, watch out for the sea of pointy rocks that jut out unexpectedly from the road, they’ll split your tyres, and have fun.

 

In the final analysis, the road was indeed shit! Your ability to enjoy the landscape on either side of the road is compromised as your gaze is continually fixed on the road five metres ahead, always on guard for those shitty sharp rocks.  How can you enjoy the sights when your body's as rigid as said rocks?  Travelling at between 20 to 50 kph, I could manage only a couple of hours driving a day, at most. If you can imagine those long white plastic tubes electricians have on their vehicles, and then imagine them coloured brown/red and lined up at right angles to the road, you’re on the way to visualising the experience.   I was sometimes so exasperated by the hoons sitting on 80 kph, whose speed would send up great clouds of red dust, blinding the driver travelling in the opposite direction, I would pull over and curse loudly, and send them a retrospective finger!  It came to me that the Gibb was their testosterone theme park, an adventure to be seized at maximum hormone levels. Carpe diem! Observing vehicles pulled over at the side of the road, ripped tyres, busted shockers, and a roll-over or two, often vehicles I recognised as having passed me at great speed, was cold comfort.   I learnt to navigate the road with trepidation and caution. 

 

The magnificence of course is in the pause that occurs when you reach your destination.  The national parks and gorges and soaring ripe apricot coloured escarpments and quirky roadhouses and waterholes and characters on the path I’ll remember to the end.  I’ve attained my Certificate 101 in Creek and River Crossings!  The key is in gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, keeping revs up, and hoping for the best!  The knowledge that I completed The Gibb without injury to body or machine is a mini triumph to my sense of adventure. 

 

 

Boab Prison Tree, 1500 years old.  This is a site where Aboriginal men and women were enslaved by whites to work in the pearling industry on the coast. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images from Windjana National Park.  Can you see the crocs (freshwater ones) in the last image?

 

Look at the utter brilliance of this bowerbird's bow.
 

 A view from the road, including those deadly rocks.

 

 

'What do you think you look like?' Said with narrowed eyes, my mother would have abhorred this image.  A woman your age should not wear such short shorts.  Mutton dressed up as lamb!  I include it here to silence judgement.  This is just before I stripped off. 

 

 

I have no idea what this plant is but I was totally enamoured by it.  Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

 

Likewise with this one. 

 

Bella mama tree

Durack camp site
 

 

My camp at Pentecost River.  Here I defied the crocs, and Scomo, by having a quick dip.  Later I learned a six metre saltwater croc, the dangerous kind, cruised along the bank at dusk, checking out visitors.  My neighbours thought me barking mad, which of course I occasionally am! 

 

Genteel me, at El Questro Station. Mum would approve!