Selfie vs Country

  A selfie? Of gnarly feet!  But check out my campsite.

Spending time in spaces of incredible natural beauty with handfuls of other tourists this week, I’ve intersected with lots of selfie-takers. I find the world of selfies cringe-worthy! It really grates.  Maybe it’s a boomer thing, the relative absence of technology in the era I grew up, a valorisation of the past.   Don’t get me wrong, faces are fascinating, their shape, contours, creases, the eyes, everything. I understand the arguments that selfies express personal agency and identity, its fluidity, construction.  Everyone needs to be seen, and heard, and selfies excel at this. Images are a language too. But a selfie foregrounds the self, fails to show the spaces we inhabit, the wonder of nature.  In the vacuum of climate change, a condition largely a result of human greed and disregard for the living earth that sustains us, it feels critical to direct attention away from the self, and focus on service, care and respect for country.

So you won’t be seeing selfies from me.  If you do, know I’ve been kidnapped, maybe even dead, and someone’s hacked my computer.  I'm making an exception for the selfie of the feet!

It’s my last day on Kangaroo Island (KI).  I love how locals welcome you on the road with that raised finger signal. No, not that one! The one that smiles, says hello, having a good day?  I remember a similar gesture in the early days in Mullumbimby.  Drivers raising their pointers from the steering wheel in salutation. It’s probably a rural or remote thing.

 

I’m disappointed not to have seen a koala. During the devastating fires in Adelaide and Kangaroo Island a little over a year ago, over three-quarters of the koala population perished.  We all saw images on TV and social media during the 2019/20 bushfires of the effect wrought on species like the koala.  It breaks my heart. I recently read an article that explores why humans are so emotionally charmed by the koala.  Apparently we attribute human qualities to them, that is, they share characteristics with babies.  I did give birth to one relatively hairy baby, but I'm not sure she'd appreciate being likened to a gumleaf-eating tree-dweller!  Anyhow, locals assure me the koala residents are being well cared for by the wellspring of adorers all over the country, nurturing and rehabilitating them in specially dedicated koala hospitals in three Australian states. 

 

The bush is recovering too, parading extraordinary resilience (see pics below), bursting with brilliance.  This happens in spite of a seemingly universal common indifference to country, multispecies and diversity.

 

Kangaroo Island weather’s been Melbournesque.  Cloudy, rainy, sunny, windy, warm, and really fucking cold.  I’ve fished out the thermals. Congratulated myself a couple of times for having the foresight to pack the sheep!

 

Disclaimer! In my time on the road, I’ve attempted the selfie twice.  The result revealed my arm was way too short, my face occupying two-thirds of the frame.  The camera must also be faulty! Hear me when I say I’m doing you a favour by abstaining from the selfie. 

 

Enjoy the images of our beautiful, rich, fascinating country.

Stokes Bay campground, I prefer gnarly trees to feet. 

 

These images are taken in Flinders Chase National Park @ Cape de Couedic in the far west of the island.  Over 90% of the park burnt. The wild beauty of destruction and despair.  Such resilience.

Sunbaking seals at Cape de Couedic

 

Admiral's Arch, the seal's hood

 

 

I see a deranged dinosaur

 And a sad pig

The 'Remarkable Rocks', by no other name. At Flinders Chase Nat Park as well.   Seeing and feeling the energy and symbology and strength of Uluru here.

 

  

Curlew doing a tap dance

 

At the Raptor Domain. The masked owl.  I swear he was eyeballing me. 

 

Magnificent coastline @ Weir's Cove

 

I'd driven 30 kms on a gravel, heavily corrugated road and had just turned onto the bitumen.  I think I was tired! I did a double take.  Thinking I might have seen a ghost, I stopped, and reversed.  

 

Back to the road now

 

By the C

 

Despite leaving home a month ago, my solo journey began only a little over a week ago.  Although I've travelled solo before, the strength of the learning journey I’m on is Everest to my mind.

I’m writing this in the library of the Meningie Public School.  It also serves as a community/tourist library. Greeting me somewhat cautiously at first, the librarian informed me:

“It’ll be noisy in about half an hour, it’s lunchtime”.

Hmmm! I can cope with that. I’m a mother, it could be entertaining.

“… then it’ll be noisy again a bit later when the fire drill happens”.

Right! Maybe I’ll be gone by then …

 

Where to begin? 

 

The first three weeks I spent with family and friends in and around Melbourne, a spirited time of conversation, film and wine. When I reflect on those weeks I see faces, and food. The faces of family, of long-time friends, engaged and engaging, active, loved.  Sisters, their familiar ways, the comfort, and old restlessness.   Old friends - past work colleagues and travelling companions, memories of Iceland, of raising children, of growing old.  A goodbye gift of eggs, passionfruit and tomatoes sweet. You know who you are.  My love for you endures.

 

A couple of weeks with Raf my son, and his beloved Maraya, their cat Tilly, and brand new Cavoodle pup, Rupert. Rupi for short. I had to zip my unease re naming rights! Rupert be damned! Raf forfeited his spare time, bless his heart, fitting out my rig, installing an inverter, shelves, bed frame, awning, the works. Vroom Vroom is now ready for the long road ahead. Figs also characterise this time.  Kilos upon kilos from the tree on the pavement, ripe, stout, juicy teardrops of gods that I ate with gusto. As their oversupply threatened to spoil, we slowly dry-roasted their sweet flesh. OMFG!

Another highpoint, albeit bittersweet, was revisiting Pelligrini’s, Melbourne’s iconic Italian café.  The face of Sisto, one of its previous co-owners is like a tattoo on my body.  His smile a million hearts of welcome, I was regularly one of its recipients during my 25-year working life in Melbourne’s CBD from the early 70s.  He embodied hospitality and warmth, and flirted like a peacock. He was killed a couple of years ago in a senseless act of violence in Bourke Street. I miss his joie de vivre.

 

Bye for now Melbourne.

During the past week since leaving the city, I’ve clung to the coastline like age spots to the face.  The Great Ocean Road on Victoria’s southern coastline runs from Torquay in the east to Allandale, near Warrnambool in the west. Sometimes called the world’s greatest war memorial, work began on its construction in 1919 and was the effort of over 3,000 returned soldiers in remembrance of their fallen comrades during WW1. Driving along its 245 km stretch of coastline, famous for its great southerly winds, breathtaking views, rugged cliffs, snake-like curves and narrow lanes is a work of serious concentration.  For a 67-year old driving an old landcruiser that’s had a very gendered (sorry men) lift, the act of steering requires inflexible concentration. The centre of gravity is all wrong, the steering hyper sensitive.  I find myself thinking death, I’m legendary for it. It’s a brute of a vehicle and I’m still warming to its singular rhythm and style.

 

a view from my camp at Bay of Martyrs

Along a stretch of The Great Ocean Road between Cape Otway and Port Fairy, hundreds of shipwrecks lay to rest on the seabed, although only a small percentage of them have been discovered.  This expanse is home to the Twelve Apostles, limestone stacks which over the years have been falling victim to the seas and erosion.   Only seven Apostles remain, the stubborn, perverse ones, but I’m fortunate to have witnessed their happy dozen standing during my childhood.  

nup, not my pic!

Occasionally, I succumb to anxiety.  Leaving home to travel solo comes with a host of niggling little apprehensions.  Yesterday, for no reason other than curiosity, I discovered scum floating on the surface of the coolant, a milky layer that screamed problem to my overactive imagination. It shouldn’t look like that, I mused.  I began googling.  Cracked head gasket! A woman with her bonnet up attracts lots of blokes, and it was those blokes, who, furrowed brow, smiling blue eyes n all, assured me it probably wasn’t all that serious.  24 hours later, I’ve relaxed a little and because I’m close to Adelaide, will get it checked.  Motto: don’t trust Mr Google.  

bush camping, Mt Richmond Nat Park

I’m beginning to find my tempo, getting into the groove of the road. Solo travellers to this point have been very few on my radar.  Occasionally when I strike up a conversation with couples, I have to bite my tongue when the refrains ‘you’re travelling alone?’ in feigned worry, or ‘it’s not safe’, or ‘don’t go to Tenant Creek … Katherine …’, threaten to destabilise my reverie.  They're fear-based narratives I refuse to invite into my thinking. Trust the universe, but tie up your camel! My everyday routine of the past five years, sitting behind a computer for long hours studying is no longer, a new everyday occupies my lens.  I’m generally at my most content behind the wheel and camped in nature. I’m up with birdcall, down by dark. Travelling ultra-slowly through space and time, feeling Country, eyes attuned to the natural world, the coastal heath, pink-barked gum, salt lakes, and the insanity of pine plantation monocultures.  My camps in the past week, mainly in the Great Otways National Parks, remind me rich ecosystems, home to a multidiversity of species, are the soul of Country. 

 

Botanic gardens, Warrnambool

Cape Bridgewater 

Blue Lake, Mt Gambier

 

The magnificent Umpherstone Sinkhole, Mt Gambier

 

Despite the occasional unease, I'm content, the road beckoning. I see people from home in the faces I encounter, their body language and visage a reminder I'm never far from the community of the Northern Rivers I call home.

 

 

 

 

 

Crow

 

Crow spreads his sure, silken wings

and enfolds the child

with the blue moon eyes

and rests there, holding

the infant in his embrace

offers her sweet plump fig

in memory of the departed

to comfort the child

and to draw from her red skin

the ache feeding on her lungs

but the fruit remains unseen

begins to decay in the bellows within

and crow departs, returns

bearing fat wine-coloured grapes

and golden peaches

while the child, laced in white socks

and perfectly-pleated tartan

rejects the fruit, starves

in the gaze of her wasteland, drawing

rings around her disguise

and a thousand moons blaze

while crow revisits, again, and again

to nest in the murky water

of the decaying, layered deposits of her lungs

while the compost grows a scar

and rotations of sun beget a woman

handcuffed to blisters, shrivelled

dry, a walking desert

as crow’s faithfulness shifts

to picking at the bloodied organ of her heart

she cries in outrage

her stubborn courage clothed inflexibly

in darkness and shame

while crow proceeds to devour her

from the inside out

 clinging to the metal scaffolding

of enslavement, cold

and rigid as a mountain

 she stands firm,

voting instead for the familiar cheap seats

until one day she stares back into

the womb of crow’s earnest black eyes

and sees pleading, praying,

a pilgrimage to the kernel

of the dripping emerald forest

like the landscape of her heart

its carpet, moist and chaotic

she has endured

surviving the howling tempests

that crush and raze with fury

an identity, a woodland, 

fluid and open, free

and unshackled by dark dishonour

nourished by networks of tall tree friends

clad in contours of breathing green

she wakes, 

 while crow takes flight

-->

-->

Nauru

Open jerry can, full

cigarette lighter, poised

Schick razor for lacerating

soft white wrists, scarred

 bedsheet noose, snared

fire blankets, rationed

hydrant, expired

W H & S training, tick

Acres of white gravel

hobnailed, crunch

And rows of ticky tacky

All made the same

marijuana traded for sex

open sewers, incubating

grey linoleum, bulge

fluorescence, pop

The Pacific Solution!

Iceland

Standing on the wet concrete floor in my red gumboots, ankle length rubber apron and hair net, I plunge the tweezers mercilessly into the slab of pale pink flesh. The pincered end of my tool meets the squirming parasite as I draw it out and deposit it into the container, already writhing with its genetic pool in the centre of the long, underlit table. By mid morning the container’s already full. The slimy little creeps have begun evacuating their vessel and are headed back across the table to their fleshy host. Get back you little fucker, I mutter under my breath, pinching them with ardent, metallic disgust. This is the value of the trawler’s overnight catch, multiple ton of infested Icelandic cod. These were the worst days. Slow drudge days, days of sluggish mood, mean humour. Days when Marianne Faithfull’s ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ blaring through the speakers with soulful melancholy, felt like your personal anthem. Under the watchful gaze of the passing supervisor, with reckless disregard, I jab the tweezers in again, and again, retrieving dozens of wrigglers from the flesh of the giant fillet. The cod-worm, Nematoda, belonging to a parasitic organism that occupies 90% of the ocean floor, are a common occurrence - don’t believe me? Google it! - and harmless, if cod is cooked to 60°. Yeah right, I’ll just get my thermometer out!

With the supervisor now on his way, I look up and meet the eye of my co-worker. We exchange winks. Without a second thought, I deftly slice the large fillet into meal size pieces and place them, side by side, remaining worms intact, in the shiny laminated box, close the lid, and smack it on the stack of others at the end of the table. No qualms! Done! Just for a moment, I’m dazzled by my audacity. The locals, the sour lot they invariably are, cheat as well, so that makes it right. Right? It’s crucial to buck the system. You see, every box that you pack above your daily quota, the bigger the bonus at the end of the week. The bigger the bonus, the further the travel at the end of your 5-month contract. This was how it had to be.

The recipient nation of this extra-protein-enhanced product are the citizens of the USA. I consider the mild sense of vindication I feel. Didn’t the USA deserve a bit of its own covert treatment? Even if only for the odd nematoda in their chowder! Surveying the pickings that trundle down the conveyor belt in large square plastic bins, I strain with the effort and pull another full load of fin, scale and muscle onto the table, empty its content, pick up my perfectly honed knife and skin half a big beast with one quick flick of my strong wrist.

The bell sounds for morning smoko. A loud rubber thwack, the sound of hundreds of factory workers removing their gloves, cracks open the darkness, as we file out, hungry for pudding, monstrous lashings of sour cream and hot cocoa.

Processing practices are surely different now. I'm talking 35 years ago. Thermometer or not, cod’s been off my personal menu since. Fish fingers? You’d have to be mad. Think worm!!!!

Sudureyri, Iceland

Winter 1980

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Long Hugsville

He of the coffee-coloured waist-length dreadlocks, over-fed pecs and hemp trousers, Adonis, and she of the saintly expression, bare midriff and colossal bosom, Persephone, are hugging in the centre of the main path leading into the garden café. Greenpeace pin-ups! Not your average shabby tree dweller. Hugee and hugor sway backwards and forwards and from side to side, enjoying the mutual sensation of each others embrace while customers sip soup and break bread inches from their hips. I can’t take my eyes off them. The passing trade finds themselves having to navigate off the path in order to make their way to the bar. I begin to get an uneasy sensation. Are they for real? It’s hard to say around here. After a long minute, or so it seems, I want to interject. Take your devotion to satsang, or get off the bloody path will you! Their complete disregard to the people movement chaos they’re causing gives me the shits. I’m feeling embarrassed, and getting prickly. One minute ten, twenty … Two minutes down and they’re still grafted to each other. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with public displays of affection. Mum did. I don’t. Persephone’s peach and lilac skirt blossoms over the path, while the scent of the patchouli oil she’s poured over herself sends the resident water dragons scampering up the central poinciana tree. Adonis is impressively big, as big as the muscular presence of cheetah on the savannah. Clearly he thinks this his urban savannah. A waiter sidles up with a loaded tray, ‘Excuse me’ he murmurs – louder, I want to yell - but the huggers are deaf as well as mute and stupid. I distract myself by sharpening my poison arrows. Wait! There’s someone else in on this. Sitting at the table closest to them, thigh high suede boots, eyes like big green saucers and wearing a belt masquerading as skirt is the other woman. Aphrodite. Is she waiting her turn at a hug with Adonis. She seems very patient. I’ve now moved through and out of embarrassment and sit firmly in mindless rage. Three and three quarter minutes. I position arrow number 1. Ah, movement! They prize themselves apart and I breath a sigh of relief. It’s a false alarm though because they separate, fractionally, faces three inches apart, and gaze into each others eyes. Endlessly they check each other’s iridology, analyse the crusty sleep in each other’s eyes, look for nits nestling in their erotic eyebrows. Buggered if I know what the wilfully unaware do! Puss in boots, sorry, Aphrodite, lingers on the side. She’s not even fidgeting. A few nervous coughs ensue, chairs get shuffled, people snigger – thank god I’m not the only murderer - raised eyebrows, more coughs. I want to throw a bucket of cold water over them! Finally, after a marathon 4 minutes, they give each other a last adoring look. Adonis turns to she of the noble tolerance and nods. Persephone sits back down at the table, picks up her bulging walnut burger, and poises her perfect teeth. Let’s see you eat that with dignity I mutter under my breath. Aphrodite wraps her arm around Adonis’ waist and they disappear out into the street. Only in Mullumbimby!

 

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Carla

All it took was the sound of her name

embodied in the other

or the arrival of August

for the memory to return

and melancholy crept back slowly

into the house of her belonging

From time to time she saw her

just for an instant

in the busy mall

the old growth forest

even in Milan

but not often, and sometimes not for years

Or did she imagine she saw her

it was hard to say

for the presence of energy

like the presence of the divine

is the ineffable mystery

beyond ones measure to recall

As the years multiplied

and they became thirty

Cat remembered she too was thirty

when the infant came

but all that was left was frozen

grandmother, mother, child

A holy trinity of profound grief

that tragic, guttural, primal wail

discreet hurried nurses

shocked silence

stillness

a painful endurance

What stays is what remains

long limbs

translucent skin

fine features

indelibly pressed into the spaces

between the spaces of her mind

Where are you now little soul

who whispers to you in the night

and fills your cup with hope

does your heart hunger

for the promise of a peaceful world

when will you come again?

CARLA BURCHALL

27 August 1984

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The cultured cushion

After my volunteer stint in Arnhem Land, I came home with several metres of handmade lino cut and screen-printed cotton produced by the wonderful indigenous women of Maningrida. What was I to do with it? The selfish part of me wanted to adorn my home with its beauty. Hang it on the wall, drape it over my bed, make a dress or skirt. After all, I worked like an ox in a timber yard for its favour, survived stifling humidity and fell victim to great gaps of mental acuity (see fruit loop brain!), and suffered the deprivation of a decent coffee for 2 weeks! I deserved it! The generous part of me, on the other hand, began contemplating my accumulation of ‘stuff’. I have heaps of it. Stuff in the closet, stuff in the storage shed, stuff on the floor, a more than healthy dose of personal stuff, and generally, stuff from here to eternity. Cushions it was then!

I’m pretty sure the plump and colourful result of my labour would make the women happy. They’re unique and original. If you run your fingertips over the fabric, you can feel the rawness of paint, imagine the women at work. They come complete with imperfections from the hand printing process, with piping in a compatible or contrasting hue, have twin ties to fasten them on the back, and are filled with the softest, bounciest, and most eco-friendly cushion inserts ever, and made from recycled water bottles.

I’m offering them for sale at $50 a pop.

Call me

0431 600 138

 

 

 

 

 

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What do you do?

'Hi, I’m X, and I’m a senior lecturer at Southern Cross Uni. What do you do?’ This enquiry comes with distracted, feigned interest, a flick of her long dark superior hair and a smugness that makes me want to puke. I fucking hate this question. I try to be magnanimous, but on less charitable days my mind leans toward the cynical. ‘What do you really want to know? What I do or how I earn my money?’ I don’t go there! Regardless, my reaction to this prescriptive, potentially socially isolating and dead-end question is probably written all over my face. I feel it instantly. The protective little hairs on the back of my neck rush toward the horizontal as my emotional landscape freezes. ‘I do lots of things" I blurt. ‘Have my finger in lots of pies’. ’ The Bard says it better than I ever could!

But really, how do I answer that question? And what question would I prefer? I ‘do’ lots of things. Sometimes I lie on my bed for hours reading. This is luxurious to the point of guilty discomfort. The only way to silence the judge that criticises my down time is to just read! I sew, curse, and unpick, and sew, curse and unpick again. A crowd of cushions I’ve been making from the fabric I was given in Arnhem land has begun to colonise my workroom. One morning a week, I head to my beloved Playback Theatre. Each week we rehearse and prepare for upcoming gigs by playing silly warm-up games for an hour, and then telling our stories. After 16 years I’m still astonished by the healing power of shared personal story, and the captive, deep-listening ensemble of actors who play them back. On Friday morning I trampse down to the farmers market to buy fruit and veg for my hospice client, and head back up to the hills to be with her. Every now and then I work as a facilitator on rite of passage camps for teenagers transitioning to adulthood. These are 5-day bush retreats and involve lots of preparation, weeks of it. Occasionally I’ll spend hours writing a blog. I’m a laborious thinker! Two or three times a week, I drive down to Brunswick Heads on a whim just to walk out onto the breakwall to feel the swell of the ocean in my bones. I cook, pick citrus, covet the neighbour’s passionfruit, sit in cafes and talk to strangers, listen to birdsong, marvel at the paragliders who sprinkle the sky outside my window, support and exasperate my friends and family, play my uke, walk the dog, and reflect on the myriad of emotions I feel during the day. Envy, desire, blame, grief, confusion. Oh yeah, I'm never short of strong feeling! I attend a weekly Buddhist study group, committee meetings, and volunteer at numerous political and community-building events. It's a long coooeee from my past life as a legal/parliamentary secretary in Melbourne, far more connecting and fulfilling, and paradoxically, virtually impossible to articulate to those with a more conventional working life.

So, next time somebody asks me that oh-so-bloody-boring question I’m going to plagiarise a response I heard at the writers’ fest. ‘I work for Arnotts in Food Technology and am currently developing a product that stops the marshmallow on an Iced Vovo from sagging’!!

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Cancer: fear, care and reflection

This photo was extracted from Google Images. It’s a fungating breast tumor, the result of breast cancer left untreated. It’s identical to the growth on the breast of a hospice client I’m caring for, as big as a dinner plate, ugly, and very unpleasant on the nose. I’ve chosen to show you this image because it’s not something you’d ordinarily see. My daughter was horrified when I showed her, but it had the effect of promoting conversation. One of my interests is to demystify the often taboo subject of death. This is a provocative way of doing it. No apologies.

For nearly 15 years I’ve worked as a volunteer hospice carer with Byron Hospice a service that supports people with a terminal illness who choose to die at home. Each week, before I get out of the car at the home of my current client, I say a little prayer to help ground and centre myself and to seek guidance, put on my invisible hat of compassion and empathy, and go and sit. I’m not there to offer advice. I’m there to listen, hold a hand.  When you speak, you’re often repeating what you already know, but when you listen, you may learn something new.

My client is my age. She’s single, has no family, and has been a very active community-minded advocate for healthy families. She’s scared and vulnerable and doesn’t want to die. Who does?

My clients are my greatest teachers. They teach me about death, but more particularly, they teach me how to live well. Am I doing enough to improve the lives of disadvantaged, marginalized and lonely people? Am I using the skills I was born with for the betterment of humans, our precious planet? Have I forgiven myself my indiscretions? Is there any unfinished business I need to attend to? Have I examined my regrets? Am I ticking items off my bucket list? Do I want to die with fear and confusion, or with dignity and grace? I know the answer to that last question. What about you?

‘The only thing that death teaches us is that it is urgent to love’ Eric Emmanuel Schmit

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Two weeks on the edge

Fellow Scorpio, novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote "I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over … you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre". Having just spent two weeks in remote Maningrida, an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, 500 km east of Darwin, I agree. Maningrida’s as far from mainstream Australia as you can get, culturally shocking, and as insightful and stimulating as a trip to India for the first time.

Before I left I was concerned with two things. How my sensitivities would cope with my perceived notion of domestic violence, and whether, as a single woman, I could transition to life there. On those two counts, my concerns proved unjustified.

I worked as a volunteer in the Bawinanga Women’s Centre, a social enterprise providing empowerment and employment for the local indigenous women. Whilst ‘work’ as we know and understand it generally means 5 days slog to enjoy 2 days rest, the opposite seems to be true for our first nations people. Despite earning a wage for hours worked, the women often didn’t show up. Sorry business – the cultural practices and protocols surrounding death which can last up to a week, ceremony, gone fishing, gone walkabout for pandanus gathering, and other long established customs inform their day-to-day and keep cultural tradition alive and well in the community. How real!

The women are sewers, textile print-makers (lino-cuts and screenprints), artists, cleaners, op-shop attendants and much more. To hear them speak ‘language’ in the Centre I was reminded of my own ignorance. An ancient lineage it is and it made me reflect on what values and beliefs I hold dear and how often they direct my life. Notwithstanding a common indigenous view that white people are ‘tissues’ – white person arrives, white person leaves, another one takes their place – I felt their reserved welcome of me, and to make the occasional eye contact, was humbling. I was fortunate to work alongside them, teach them a few sewing techniques, and learn a whole lot more from them. Here’s some of their lovely work.

Dilly bag designs, lino-cuts

Helping with screen-printing. A stunning bamboo design

More screen-printed designs

All these designs, and hundreds more can be viewed, and bought at wwwbabbarradesigns.com.au

A parallel universe it might be, but the alternative reality was at such odds to my own that the cultural difference I experienced left me feeling emotionally drained and disturbed. As far as most of the balandas (white people) there are concerned, the Government ‘Intervention’ is a failure. Housing’s an issue, but mainly for the balandas. There’s never enough. The housing built to accommodate the indigenous people on the other hand, from the outside at least, seemed neither wanted nor needed. While I was told its frowned upon by authorities, the locals look far more comfortable sitting on the dusty red earth around the ubiquitous fire, burning day and night, in the front yard. The constant smell of smoke in town made it hard to breath. The supermarkets bulge with soft drinks, sweet biscuits, potato chips, long life milk products and 2-minute noodles. Sugar is devoured with a kind of manic obsession and the packaging dropped where it lands. ‘White man’s products! White man’s problem’! The town is one depressed looking garbage dump. The mangy, emaciated, scabby dogs in their hundreds satiate their rabid hunger by foraging through the balandas bins, knocked over by one large roaming resident pig who also feasts on dog and human faeces. "Watch that you don’t hit the dogs on the street" I’m warned, ‘Otherwise you’ll pay". Why the dogs appear to command the reverence of a holy cow I never found out. The effects of smoking and sugar consumption pose the two most serious health risks in the community, according to my friend who’s employed by the health service. About 10 percent of the school age children in town turn up to school. And why would they? They’re being asked to learn a curriculum in a language foreign to them! Once the young men are initiated at around 12, there seems no good reason for them to return to school. The school counsellor I spoke to one evening was at a complete loss to know how to engage them. ‘There’s no good male role models in town’ she lamented.

One of the most shocking of all sights I encountered though was ‘death alley’ (my description). This is a stretch of coastline some 500 metres long at the edge of town where the locals dump the clothes and personal effects of their dead. Custom suggests that the incoming tide will 5 times wash the effects clean of any undesirable spirit energy, and then, in an ideal world, it would be transferred to the tip. This doesn’t happen of course, and the result is a coastline littered with rotting and rusty rubbish, including car batteries, prams, fridges, lengths of iron, mattresses, bed-frames. etc.

I recommend the edge. It's a fascinating place, full of wonder and knowledge.

Thanks women of Maningrida.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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