Tasting paddles

“Don’t slip the clutch any more than that. It’s a metal clutch, that’s not good for it.” My ‘sighting’ lap of the sprint circuit at Collie Motorplex began with tips from the owner – Andy Thompson – on how to ensure the longevity of his racing Triumph (no, that’s not an oxymoron!). As we made our way gently around the track behind the pace car, Andy, who’s raced it many times before, recommended speeds, gears and racing lines … most of which I instantly forgot. I assured him that I wouldn’t be trying to set any records, just bumbling around as best I could. Little did I know the addictiveness of this game.

Yes ... I have a thumb!

Andy’s a Triumph tragic like myself – except whereas I have one Triumph and scarcely enough mechanical knowledge and ability to keep it running, Andy has five. He also has a very patient wife, Del, who says “he can have as many Triumphs as he likes, as long as they’re all running.”

A few weeks back I called Andy to see if we could drop in to see them in Perth when we made it that far south. It just so happened that the annual week-long Triumph Sports Owners Australia (TSOA) National meet was being held in Western Australia this year, and Andy – a very generous man – offered me a drive in his race car and a loan of his 1972 convertible Triumph Stag for the week. So that’s why we hurried down the coast.

And boy, was it worth it!

The low-to-the-ground V8 was perfect for touring the mind-blowingly picturesque Margaret River region. It’s home to about 120 wineries, incredible Jarrah forests and a white sand and cliff-encrusted coastline worthy of a blog all of its own. Although the sun was too intense for us to lower the roof without turning the colour of the local Merlot, we cruised around the area enjoying the twisting roads and appreciating the lush green spring almost as much as the many dairy cows.

Stag in the woods

Food and wine tourism is key to the local economy and the place is set up to take advantage of this. Essentially there’s a main road connecting (from north to south) the small towns of Bussleton, Margaret River and Augusta. Between this road and the coast, running parallel, is the sinuous visitor-friendly Caves Road (named for the natural caves rather than as a nod to subterranean wine storage). Sandwiched between these two roads, down little lanes and dirt tracks, nestled among the trees or in pastures, are dotted dozens and dozens of food and beverage producers, galleries and other twee tourist destinations.

It’s not that we don’t like wine, but where do you start when there are so many places to choose from and your powers of description are as exacting as ‘nice,’ ‘not-so-nice’ and ‘mmm, fruity’? Fortunately we are discerning beer drinkers and there are six craft breweries in the area with really distinctive beers, as we discovered.

Most beer drinkers make their choice based on the logos and colour schemes on the containers, the advertising campaigns and perhaps the part of the world or country that the beer comes from (or claims to come from). To such people taste isn’t differentiated, and the ingredients, methods employed and even the beer style is superfluous. It’s probably because most of the stuff available is brewed in pursuit of money, but denial of flavour. However, a growing number of small breweries in Australia are fronted by artisans obsessed with tantalising beer-drinkers’ taste-buds.

Researching for some magazine articles about such breweries, we spent a couple of days interviewing head brewers, quaffing tasting paddles (small trays with selections of the breweries’ wares) and generally getting very warm and fuzzy about what an excellent job they’re all doing. We tried chocolate and spelt beers at Bush Shack brewery, tasty German style offerings at Duckstein, precise, well-rounded beers at Colonial, and subtle refined treats at Cowaramup. All of these in superb locations.

Our final visit was to Bootleg Brewery and we arrived as the head brewer and general manager Michael Brookes was overseeing a batch of his award-winning Raging Bull. “Ella, you can add the hops for me.” She duly obliged.

Ella the Bootleg brewer

By the end of the week we were a bit ‘breweried out’ and we didn’t even make it over to three other more out of the way breweries. We headed back up to Perth to return the Stag and service THE BENCH at the Thompson’s place. We also wanted to see how things had turned out with the racing car.

Oh yes, the racing … how did that go?

Let me just say that I’d never had a go on a racetrack before, and the car was like no other Triumph I’d driven – incredibly rapid, very well-balanced and actually surprisingly easy to drive fast. Perhaps too easy for someone of my inexperience. In my first three-lap session I got faster and faster, learning the corners, the limits of the unbelievably grippy tyres and the awesome stopping power of the all-round disc brakes. I even managed to overtake another competitor (TR4a) and close in on a second (TR8). Perhaps, as I wrestled with the controls, I even slightly overstepped the rev limit at one point.

Entering the pits my adrenalin-filled body, now just a frame to control a race car, could hardly be contained by the harnesses. My borrowed helmet suddenly too tight for my rapidly swelling Grand Prix destined head. Just wait ‘til I get back on the track, I’m getting faster and faster!

Hunting a TR4a at Collie Motorplex

They say that pride comes before a fall.

Andy had very recently rebuilt the top half of the engine (read about it here on Andy’s blog) to give more power. He was second car out as he headed out on his second set of three laps and I watched and waited to see if he’d catch the car in front. The first car passed, then there was a big gap … then Humphrey (Andy’s mate) came past. No sign of Andy. Bugger!

Into the pit lane limped ‘the white thing.’ A blown differential meant our day’s racing was over after just a third of our track time. Andy was rather blasé about it, in a ‘shit happens’ kind of way. He still managed to get fourth out of 32 drivers and I came 17^th.

After just a soupçon of racing a Triumph I’m sure I’d like to have another go. After a week driving a Stag, I’m hooked. And as for the south-west. Well, we tried a tasting paddle, now we’re going back for the full pint.

Where the wildflowers are

Bang! Suddenly we’re surrounded by windswept wheatfields and very gentle, almost rolling, hills. If I squint (not a great idea when you’re driving admittedly) it reminds me of the Lincolnshire Wolds, the landscape of my childhood, except there’s no escape from the immense scale of this scene. It’s like the hilly part of Lincolnshire, but stomped down by the god of farming and flattened. It’s not four miles to the next village; there are no villages, it’s 100 km to the next farm. Even the sky looks bigger.

We came south in search of spring. A break from the unrelenting heat of the north. We found not only cooler weather, but new types of landscapes, things we haven’t seen before.

You’d think that if you followed the long lines of latitude all the way across from the east coast, trudged out from the beaches, across the forested Great Dividing Range, through the vast Queensland cattle country and on, you would pass through the lonely deserts and eventually back into pastoral land, returning to forests and finally arrive on western beaches. It doesn’t quite happen like this.

There are no massive ranges to provide altitude for rain on the west coast – at least not north of Perth. In the east, South East Queensland down to Sydney is classified as a sub-tropical (think warm and wet for half the year, warm and dry for the other half), but at the same point on the west it’s dry all year around. The lonely deserts reach out to the sea and form the coastline that Dutch sailors left well alone when they made their reconnaissance trips from the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century.

Perhaps if they’d come at the right time of year parts of the west coast of Australia would now be full of Dutch florists making money from the abundance of wildflowers. We first see these incredible species in the verges at the side of the roads by the fields. Occasional glimpses of mauves, oranges, reds, silvers, whites. Such a stark change from the relentless dusty greens and beiges and ferrous reds we’ve been travelling through for so long. So we stop and take photographs. And then we stop again. It gets silly; we’ll never make any progress like this.

Wildflower type things

We cross the Murchison River and take the turning to Kalbarri National Park. It’s another green space on the map, this time on the coast, but with a white space for a small town in the middle. Again, we don’t know what the green space will hold. It’s not forest and it’s not desert; it’s something else entirely. It looks almost like moorland. Swathes of low green heather-like bushes completely cover the hillsides as far as the eyes can see. But that defies the complexity. In the foreground an incredible diversity of prehistoric looking flowers display all the colours of the rainbow. And the colours are made of other colours, like a photo mosaic. Look closely and you see that a purple is made up of reds and browns and whites.

We don’t really know what we’re looking at, but it’s brilliant. There’s an incredible cinematic quality to the landscape and we half expect to see Monty Don wandering amongst it all waxing lyrical when he finds a particularly exciting specimen.

More wildflowers

There's even more like this at http://www.flickr.com/photos/reeksyofoz/sets/72157621240833297/

The town of Kalbarri is a great little place. A sheltered harbour, a bit like a youthful Cornish village but without the cliffs (although they’re not far away). It’s full of fish and chip shops, pubs and caravan parks and makes a popular holiday location for city folk from Perth. I’m guessing that’s why there are lots of modest three bedroom houses advertised for half a million dollars even though we’re still 600 km out of the city.

Like so many of the National Parks we’ve visited there’s a stunning gorge. The Murchison river that we crossed on the highway winds out to the sea through this moorland carving a deep ravine into the fabulous candystriped layers of Tumblagooda sandstone. We wander down the steep side to swim in the river and find to our surprise that it’s salty. At least we’re far enough south now that we don’t have to worry about crocs.

Murchison River gorge at Kalbarri National Park

We spend a few days looking around but there’s an appointment to the south that calls so we’re on our way again, stopping briefly in Geraldton. On the way into this attractive coastal town that seems to be midway through a gentrification process, we realise that there’s something we’ve been blissfully free of for the last three months: faceless homogenous suburbs. Places that could be anywhere, houses that all look the same. Tidy lawns and patios and bored nine to fivers. Best not dwell on that for too long or we’ll start having nightmares about our trip finishing!

We whistle through a few more National Parks. Ella waits while I wander through a 300 metre underground cave at Stockyard Gully NP, where a river has carved through the limestone. Then we’re flabbergasted again by wildflowers, this time at Lesueur National Park. It’s as if the West Australia government had held a competition to build the world’s biggest rockery to attract tourists – a nature-based alternative to the east coast’s Opera House. Except nobody built this place. Lesueur is the product of a mediterranean climate and nutrient poor soils that have spent millions of years without any exciting ice ages or seismic activity to pep things up.

Ella at Lesueur National Park

Graham in the cave

As we close in on Perth we call up the National Parks office to get directions to camp in Avon Valley NP. The Ranger baulks at trying to explain the route over the phone and instead opts to treat us to a night in another easier to find, but generally off-limits location. It isn’t advertised so I better not tell you where it is, but it makes for a nice place to write this post.

Green spaces (and caption competition)

“What the bloody hell are you?”

There’s no response from the 30 cm long shiny grey stick-shaped object that’s floating towards me. But from the expression of surprise on its wildly elongated face, given by an oversized eye reminiscent of an elderly monocled resident of a gentleman’s club that’s just seen a woman walk in, I expect it’s asking the very same question of me. We vacate each other’s space rather than carry on this attempt to overcome the salty language barrier of the largest fringe coral reef in Australia.

I’ve only been snorkelling once before, and it was a few years’ back, but it turns out that it’s as easy as breathing underwater. I mean breathing, but underwater … and with the aid of a snorkel. I even manage to swim at the same time. It’s a relief seeing as we bought snorkel sets specifically for this part of the trip. Cape Range National Park covers a large chunk of the Ningaloo Reef peninsula that flaps out into the sea, like a big, no make that huge, windblown sand dune.

Why do they call it Turquoise Bay?

In some ways the map has played tricks on us. National Parks are marked with a green colour, wherever they are in the country. Once again colour association seems to trigger expectations. White equals empty. Blue equals sea or lake. Green equals, well greenery – forests, or at least trees, surely? Not here it doesn’t. We’re in another place that used to be underwater. The land was once coral reef, and as the sea has receded, the coral eroded and the wind and dry conditions seem to have left a bare sandy kind of landscape. A spectacular one nonetheless. There’s still plenty of coral underwater to have snorkel through, but unfortunately we’ve arrived in a particularly windy time and there’s not much chance of shelter on land. It’s not ideal for snorkelling, although we gave it a shot. To be honest it was actually a little bit cold! Getting here was fun, however.

From Broome we’d put the white space on our left, the blue space just out of sight on the right and, heading for some other green spaces, driven six hundred kilometres south west down the looooong straight road to Port Hedland; a place that seems to be owned by mining companies. A place with mile long trains, queuing up to be loaded with any number of different things that have been dug up out of the ground, or in the case of the big piles of salt, evaporated out of the water. More importantly to us, though, this town was our gateway to the Pilbara – another region that existed in my mind until this point, a bit like the Kimberley, almost as a legend.

Eschewing the coast, we head due south and into the dusty desert on the lesser-travelled dirt road. Like so many places, the Pilbara is a landscape where there’s a tension between its various uses. After thousands of years of uninterrupted nomadic settlement, European pastoralists arrived on the scene, running sheep or cattle, or anything that they could get to live in this arid environment. Then came mining companies to extract the iron ore and other goodies that are so abundant. Where there’s miners, there’s sure to be environmentalists hot on their heels, so fortunately some of the really special areas have been sectioned off as National Parks.

After so long driving through flat land the start of the Hamersley Range has us both ooing and aahing. The hills look so still and ancient. Through the millennia they’ve weathered so much in places that at the bottom of gullies sediment has piled into mounds that huddle at the feet of the ranges like their children. The Pilbara is over 3000 million years old (Earth itself is thought to be 4500 million years old) and covers a whopping 510 000 square kilometres. So it’s an area more than twice the size of the UK – or if you prefer to work with standard comparative metrics this means you can fit 7.5 Tasmanias into the Pilbara and god alone knows how many Olympic swimming pools.

There’s nothing to interrupt the view, so the whole drive is amazing. It’s like a geological stripshow; barely clad rocks and mountains appear behind each other, lightly clad in clumps of Spinifex grass that look like goosebumps. At points the profusion of these clumps blurring past the window remind us of moorland. Willy willys – tiny dust tornadoes – spiral black dust up into the sky. The road winds up onto a plateau through the Millstream-Chichester National Park and from the lookouts the view is epic and serene. Unlike some of the more popular Parks we’ve visited, it’s more or less deserted.

Some Hamersley Range

Blurring past the hills

Further south and on to Karijini National Park, and it’s more of the same. But it’s different, too. There are spectacular gorges cut into stone as red as Mars with water slowly seeping through them, and this means there are more people around. We’re lucky though, because the weather hasn’t really begun to warm up yet this year and it’s only mid-thirties and relatively cool in the gorges. The water in the pools gets virtually no sun and quite cold as a result.

Fern Pool at Karijini

After a couple of days enjoying the gorge oases things start to heat up so we decided to make tracks. It’s time to head back out towards the coast.

Along the way we got a photo of one of my favourite Australian road signs … so it’s time for a caption competition. Send us your idea for a caption for this by using the comments section below and we’ll find an independent judge along the way to choose the winner. The winner will get an entirely random prize picked up along the way in a roadhouse.

Caption competition ... come on I can think of several!

Moving through white spaces

“Things go past so quickly that we can’t take it in. Sometimes it would be nice to have some time with nothing to do, just to make sense of it all.” So says Kariina about her epic journey with husband Margus. They’re the first Estonians to try circumnavigating the world by motorbike. They’re about half way around. We camped next to them and their trusty battle-scarred BMW in Broome and got talking with them about the concept of spending a month on a cargo ship – something they considered doing to get between continents. Unsurprisingly they changed their minds when they found out it cost US$100 per person per day.

The idea of everything passing in a blur is something we can identify with, even though we’ve been travelling for a fraction of the time they’ve been on the road, and with the luxury of seats and a couple of extra wheels. Writing this blog makes us stop and helps us filter through our thoughts. Hopefully the Estonian Tsiklonauts find their blog just as helpful. Check it out at http://yhelteljel.ee/ and don’t be put off if your Estonian is rusty, there’s a link to their English translation site on the main page.

Estonian ‘tsiklonauts’

On the way to Broome we skirted the Kimberley region by taking the Great Northern Highway from Kununurra. It’s a 600 mile drive – the distance from Aberdeen to Exeter, or Los Angeles to San Francisco. But there are only a couple of small towns along the way and it’s two relatively easy days of driving. There’s no decisions to make, no turnings to take. On a map the road is a sickle-shaped red line that cuts through a lot of white space.

The alternative would have been the iconic Gibb River four wheel drive Road. It would have shown us the Kimberley, but much as we want to go there, we decided that it was too hot, too dry and in danger of getting too wet, too soon. It can wait until next time. Fortunately a friend – John Halbrook – recently visited, so I urge you to read about what we missed on his excellent wordpress site, Down Under.

…

So we opted for white spaces, white hot with bleached grass, dry creek beds peppered with the hoof marks of disappointed cows, sparse trees and scattered blood orange ant hills that stick up in the landscape like armies of sunburnt meer cats.

These white spaces feature long stretches that seem like they’ll never end, punctuated by cries of “look, it’s a road sign up ahead!” They’ve also given birth to a unique style of driving we’re calling the Outback Slouchback. Basically, it seems the drivers get so hot and bored plugging away down the straights that their backbones melt. In a desperate attempt to keep their heads high enough to see the road they slump forward and hug on to the steering wheel. And stay this way until either the weather cools or someone peels them from the car.

One of the great things about the white spaces is that when they’re broken it’s by something truly spectacular, as if whatever made the landscape had a sudden flash of inspiration. Breathing new life into our trip was Geikie Gorge, part of the Fitzroy River – the fifth largest river by volume (at peak flood) in the world.

Shaun, the Ranger at Geikie Gorge (20 kms from Fitzroy Crossing), took us on a brilliant one hour boat tour of the river. The Fitzroy’s rolling gently downstream when we visit, but the facts flow from Shaun’s mouth like the summer floods that come cascading out of the Kimberleys. All this water – enough to fill Sydney Harbour in six hours when it’s on form – is provided by a catchment one and a half times the size of Tasmania. The Gorge is home to a staggering diversity of birds and fishes and also the freshwater crocodile. The cliffs along the gorge are fossilised coral reefs, 350 million years old and at points disappearing two kilometres into the earth. They’re a welcome change to flat featureless scenery.

“I came in 1994 and was so taken by it I’ve never left” says Shaun. But the fine ecological balance of this haven is under threat, from the wild passionfruit (an invasive weed) that out-competes the native flora and coats the river banks, and the reptilian evil on green legs that is the cane toad. “The toads are expected to reach here in the next two or three years and they’ll lead to a 77% decline in freshwater crocodiles”.

Geikie Gorge – fossilised Coral Reef

The red sickle-shaped road finally meets the blue part of the map at Broome – famous for pearling and the multicultural population that flocked to try its hand at getting rich.

Getting into Broome wasn’t as easy as it should be. Some plonker had been trying his hand at arson and setting fire to the bush. It’s a seriously dangerous thing to do, and sadly the cause of many bushfires and deaths. So we spent an hour or so queuing 10 kms outside the town while the road was closed for our safety.

Bushfires on the edge of Broome

We got a bit carried away with Oktoberfest at Matsos, the local Broome microwbrewery, (you should be able to read my review of  Matsos in the Autumn edition of Beer & Brewer magazine -  it hits Aussie and NZ shelves in February). However, we still made time to visit Cable Beach, named as the place where the telegraph link to Indonesia reached Australia. We had a wander, took some photos, saw the Camel rides (I think they’re just Donkeys that got the hump really), but never did find the cable.

Ella on Cable Beach

Posh Donkey rides

While it’s handy to stock up on provisions we get a bit unsure what to do in towns, with all their fancy ways, reticulated water, traffic lights and the like. So, whilst mulling over ten different types of beer (including the surprisingly good and oh so suitable Man-Go-Beer), we formulated a plan of action to meander down the coast in search of Spring.

The wild west?

A blurred silhouette appears at the side of the road.  Perhaps it’s a ‘roo? As we get closer a shape takes form. A cow. Or rather, a white leather bag full of bones. It reacts with surprise at the sound of the car and stumbles as it looks up, then staggers like an aged boxer that’s taken his last punch. Soon it will be another carcass for the eagles and crows to pick at. I’m not sure what would be the better ending– dehydrated delirium, or the chaos of being crammed in a road train and taken to a port sent to Asia as a live export.

It’s about 4000 km from Darwin to Perth by the fastest road route – a lot of room for change. I imagined a lot of room full of not a lot, but with a touch of the ‘wild west’ – cattle stations and the imagery of Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia. You never see emaciated cows in the movies, do you?

At first the Victoria Highway was lonely and uninspiring, just a long grey strip of bitumen leading to the vanishing point, flanked by flared beige strips of dirt and splodges of parched stunted bush. This land seemed less stereotypically tropical and more desert-like.

For much of the time we were the only traffic. The peak of the tourist season has passed and there isn’t much need for road trains. It was hot and dry – where did the humidity of the wet season ‘build up’ go?

Victoria River

Just as we’re resigning ourselves to a boring drive the landscape changes and it suddenly feels like we’re touring a western movie set. The majestic Victoria River threads through sandstone escarpments and gorges. It’s snakelike and lazy and full of crocs.

We arrive at Timber Creek. It’s a name that ‘fits the bill’ perfectly. I’m hoping for log cabins and banjos, yokels and spittoons, the smell of sawdust and the clatter of saloon doors as a loser in a fight is horizontally ejected. Maybe the locals will speak slightly out of time with their soundtrack, just like in Sergio Leone’s epics.

We’re out of luck though. There’s just a petrol station, pub and caravan park. But a little further along the road is an enjoyable reminder of frontier days. The explorer Augustus Gregory spent several months of 1855-56 checking the suitability of the land for agriculture and searching for the inland sea that Europeans believed must have existed in the centre of the continent. We paid a visit to the site of his base camp, marked by a heavily carved Boab tree.

The wonderful Boab tree (called the Baobab in Africa) is a common feature out here. They look a bit like upturned silver slugs, with bloated trunks that store water and enable them to produce an amazing fruit; they look a bit like an overgrown kiwi fruit but feel velvety and have a hard shell. Inside the shell is a dry powdery honeycomb fibre and tiny, rock hard nuts.

Gregory's Boab

We were hoping to see some more of Gregory National Park on the four wheel drive track, but most of it was closed for aerial culling. This isn’t when the Rangers go ‘troppo’ and snap all the tourists’ car aerials, but when they fly around in choppers and shoot feral animals to prevent them from taking over.

Crossing the border into a new State – Western Australia (WA) was a little like coming into a new country. There’s a new time zone to deal with, and a quarantine checkpoint, where you’re frisked (not literally, although they do check your car) for fruit and vegetables. Cynic that I am, I feel sure that this is more done to protect the local economy than keep the pests at bay.

Argyle is a very big name in this part of WA. It’s the name of the world’s largest diamond producing mine, and what was once the biggest cattle station in the world. This was flooded to make the largest man-made lake in the country. I wonder what the explorer Gregory might have made of this. He gave up on finding an inland sea, and then 100 years later the Aussies decided to make one by damming the Ord River to supply an irrigation scheme.

A tiny part of Lake Argyle

As part of the scheme a town was built, Kununurra, and farms to use the water. As fresh food junkies, we were fairly excited. Again I had premonitions: there would be paddy fields and orchards, public fountains and water sports. It would look like the hanging gardens of Babylon (whatever that looked like) and there would be incredible vegetable markets and a fibreglass rendition of the world’s largest watermelon.

Once more I was disappointed. I could be setting my expectations a little high. The 6000 residents of Kununurra have done a nice job of irrigating their gardens and tourist parks and there’s an impressive Ramsar listed wetland, but we were totally underwhelmed by the food on offer. There are two supermarkets – a national and an independent. Neither had anything other than the normal fare. Maybe all the produce is sent elsewhere?

The front page of the local paper was revealing. Only 7% of the water available from the irrigation system is being used. There are plans to expand, but this is controversial because half of the annual inflows to Lake Argyle are lost to evaporation (amounting to 2000 gigalitres) and on average one quarter of the dam’s water is lost to evaporation each year. It’s reckoned that if the Lake had existed in the 1930s the droughts would have dried it up.

We followed a river out to the coastal town of Wyndham to enjoy the elevated views of a phenomenal landscape. The view was great, and it’s a good thing too, because the town could be summed up with just one of the 19 historical facts on its tourist noticeboard:

1985: the arrival of commercial TV.

Looking over Wyndham to the Kimberley

Car crash #45

A car crash that already happened

Our project in Nganmarriyanga was over before it really began. The three days we were there are best described as an uncomfortable dream. Not a wake-in-fright sit bolt upright cold sweat in the night kind of dream, but a slowly forming realisation that things are sliding out of control. It’s like the opposite of a lucid dream. No matter what you try and do, however hard you steer, there’s no way things will improve.

There’s no clear beginning point to the dream, but I remember that Ella and I counted forty-four crashed cars on the dirt road on our way to the community. Spookily, exactly half were on the left hand side of the road.

It’s a typically hot afternoon. Arriving at the Government demountables that I mentioned in the last post we find people inside, although they’re supposed to be uninhabitable.

These places smell unnatural, like photocopier toner or plastic packaging. Air conditioning is fiercely applied to mask the smell in the way that cold brie has no taste. It doesn’t work. We present ourselves to the Government boss man. He’s been made ill by the toxic chemicals so he lives in a caravan. The few others just shrug their shoulders. But it’s getting late – where will we sleep?

We’re offered the breezeway – a space between the demountables. We can bed down amongst the tables, chairs, ping-pong table and whiteboards. This won’t do – so a chateau is erected, just behind the caravan. It’s less a French castle and more a big tent. But as big as it is, it’s just a space – we can’t find a kitchen, a bathroom, a toilet. There’s not even a tap. So we get a chateau, but will need a respirator to take a leak. There are no respirators.

We’re dazed and befuddled. There are lots of people in cars. Back and forth, back and forth. Shuttle runs of 100 metres. Round and round the community. To the shop for some coke. To the health centre to fix the problem caused by the coke. And back again. Anything to avoid walking. But this isn’t causing the confusion.

A white man asks, what are we doing here? We’re here for the project. What project? The community vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens? Yes, the vegetable gardens. The women, the men, the children. The gardens. We’re to be here for some time. But where will you live?

On the floor. On a sheet. Under a tree. In a circle. A grey-haired woman, two black-haired women, another grey-haired woman. A blonde woman. One man. Two languages. Questions asked. Discussion. Answers. Agreements. Suggestions. Laughter. Understanding. Grow by the Women’s Centre. Cook in the Women’s Centre. Live in the Women’s Centre, over there – the closed up, locked up empty fortress. This sounds familiar – maybe it’s dé·jà vu.

It has begun. It will happen.

In the chateau at night it is cool. The full moon’s milky glow lights up the horses, the cows and the dogs that wander past. And beneath the full moon there are shadows. And in the shadows an unseen force floats.

Everyone fears the unseen force. It comes and takes control. It came and locked doors, demanded money. It came and said no.

A search for someone who can hold the floodwaters back. A search for someone who knows what’s going on. A search in vain for a leader. We wander through the community calling out names, following points, approaching doors. But no one can help.

It will not begin. It will not happen.

A lump hammer falls from a metre high and crashes against a concrete slab. The head of a massive cane toad muffles the sound. The contents explode. Legs twitch. The hammer falls again, to be sure.

A harsh, low, reverberating noise hums and grinds. Doors bang. The school is being cleaned and the noise has woken me. I’m on the floor in the library and in my early morning sleepiness I can hear the sound of a song in amongst the note of the vacuum cleaner and the lyrics sound like a cheerful instruction: Go west, live is peaceful there.

A push start in the twilight

The key turns in the ignition, but there’s no response – not even a click. We’re stranded just outside our destination – Wadeye. So near, so far. A push start in twilight after seven hours driving is not the best preparation for our first experience of Australia’s largest, and most infamous, aboriginal community. But it’s better than being towed. Fortunately, THE BENCH starts easily first shove, so we trundle down the modest high street under our own power. We negotiate the grid pattern of single-storey housing, and pass through the haze from the hordes of tiny evening campfires that keep mosquitoes and sandflies at bay. The aluminium panels of the Land Rover protect us from the first wave of culture shock, but at the same time make us as conspicuous as a harp in a heavy metal band.

Metallica, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Slayer. It reads like the posters in the bedroom of a white American teenager’s bedroom circa. 1988, but this is the basic graffiti scrawled on the walls of the town’s buildings, on the bitumen roads, on the pavements. There are swastikas, too. I’m confused, even though I’d read about gangs and their affiliation with white heavy metal bands in this place.

Wadeye used to be called Port Keats, and like lots of places where the official name’s changed, old and new seem to be interchangeable. A further source of bewilderment is the pronunciation; we hear a newsreader on the radio refer to wad-err and other people switch between that pronunciation and the more obvious wad-eye. Port Keats Catholic mission was established here in the first half of the 20^th century, and many tribes from the wider Daly River region were offered ‘salvation’ (and no doubt were bribed with food and shelter). Over time the town developed, but tribal rivalries die hard. They have mutated into what the Press call ‘gang culture’.

Sensationalist journalism has apparently concentrated on negative issues, so the reading up on Wadeye that I did before we visited didn’t exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy. Over the day and two nights we’re in town, however, there are few signs of trouble. We hear that the Post Office has been broken into, but I don’t imagine there are many towns with 3000 people, high rates of unemployment and numerous other social problems that don’t have issues with vandalism and youth discontent.

There is a tussle going on in Wadeye, though. Overcrowding, poor hygiene, Top End weather and pervasive dust mean there’s a never-ending fight against Scabies. It’s Tuesday. It’s Scabies Day. Every week. It’s not a celebration, there’s no party in Scabies’ honour. It’s a clean-up day intended to eradicate the nasty mite. I see a poster that explains that four people live in the average white Australian household, but 16 are crammed into a typical (read small and very basic) Aboriginal Australian’s house. On Scabies Day kids are kept home from school, presumably to help out, but activity looks patchy. Some yards are being swept and bedding is hung out in the sun, but it looks like this occurs in the best-kept houses only and there are others just next door that from the road don’t look like they’ve ever been cleaned.

We’re not in Wadeye just to drive around poking our noses into other people’s business, making flimsy judgements on the way people live. We’re here with Dennis – one of Darwin’s ICV  Project Managers – to see if Wadeye needs any volunteers from ICV. It’s a subtle process of meeting people and waiting to hear if they have needs, but not barging in and suggesting ideas.

It turns out to be a tricky day to get hold of anyone and we don’t really have any luck in finding out about projects we might be able to help on. Possibilities fall by the wayside. Frustrated, we go for a walk in the afternoon, along the airstrip where we’ve seen at least three or four planes land and take off that day.

It’s hot and humid, and those who can tend to drive even the short distances around town. But taking a walk means we can actually talk to people, even if it’s just a nod and hello. A young lad in an AFL (Aussie Rules) shirt holding a plastic bottle full of marbles wraps himself around my waist and asks where we’re going. Before I can answer, he gets shy and runs back to his parents.

In the distance an immense Cumulonimbus cloud has gathered silently, but it’s beginning to crackle and, suspecting a downpour is imminent, we head back to our accommodation. This is what the ‘build up’ to the monsoon season is all about.

Big cloud

Cloud getting smaller ... quickly

Dennis gets permission from the town’s elders for us to drive out to the beach for sunset. The monster cloud has collapsed and dropped its load somewhere to the east so we take the 10-minute drive. It’s beautiful and deserted and we sit around for an hour reflecting on the situation in the town. We’ve only been here for a very short time, and while we feel comfortable, something isn’t quite right. We are naïve, of course, but there seems to be something here that is preventing things from happening. Perhaps it’s the wrong day, bad timing, or perhaps it’s just that there’s nothing that we can help with. No matter.

…

Getting to Wadeye was interesting. Dirt roads are always a lottery. Depending on the weather, the amount of use and the type of traffic that passes through, their condition varies tremendously. Rain washes out sections of the road, leaving tortuous ruts. Heavy use corrugates the surface so it’s like driving across a draining board – regardless of speed your brain rattles like a pea in a whistle.

On our way in we were in luck. For a while. Then there was dust ground fine like flour hiding treacherous potholes. Then it’s corrugated and we’re mimicking rodeo competitors. We drove dozens of kilometres like this, slowing down and speeding up as required, passing through a seemingly endless landscape of uniform height eucalypts coated in the rust-coloured dust from the road.

Scattered along the roadsides was the Dead Car Dreaming: improbably bent Kingswoods and early model Landcruisers relenting to the elements. Well, in moist clean air like this, who wouldn’t oxidise? I’d like to think they’re the local signage – mileposts and waymarkers – that make up for the absence of anything else. “Turn left at the first track after the Holden.”

The lack of road signs suggested that only local people travel this way, but as daylight began to fade a trickle of hire cars came over the horizon. White four wheel drive utility vehicles emblazoned with Thrifty and Sargent logos marking them out as worker’s transport. Among the few cars heading towards the sun like us was a battered red Holden station wagon. It was full of people, all the windows wound down and the windscreen cracked into a spiders-web pattern so the driver surely couldn’t see the way. A small flatbed truck was towing the sad-looking heap; together they were kicking up clouds of dust despite the snails pace. We overtook, and through the sandy air saw that the truck-driver looked out on the world through shattered glass, too.

It seemed like hours until we reached the novelty of official signs. A couple of ‘slow’ signs announced that a grader was operating ahead, scraping and forming the surface of the wide road. They might as well have said ‘fast’. The clean road enabled a quicker pace, and after all the swerving, weaving and braking it was a relief to hum along at a constant speed on a silk-like surface. Suddenly two more signs loomed up ahead: ‘stop’. Common sense said there was nothing on this endless straight road to stop for, but after hours of driving in the heat we were addled enough to start to obey and the anchors went on, until we realised that ‘stop’ was written on the reverse of the ‘slow’ signs in position for drivers coming from the other direction.

The last 20 kilometres were smooth and fast. We raced towards the coast as if we could reach the horizon and catch the sun before it dropped. We were tracking alongside a tall forest that must have been burnt out a few months ago. Below the patchy canopy cycad palms looked like ornate emerald wine goblets, bursting upwards, ecstatic at the opportunity for sun that burning provided them. We finally reached a T-junction just outside Wadeye and Dennis was waiting to guide us into town. It was then that I made the mistake of turning the engine off to talk to Dennis out of the window and THE BENCH wouldn’t start again.

It turned out that the bumpy ride on the way into Wadeye had dislodged a battery cable and that’s why the car wouldn’t start. All it needed for a fix was a few turns with a spanner. Once our time in Wadeye was over, we heading back up the road to another, smaller, community.

Dennis and Ella at Wadeye beach

…

Returning along a route previously taken is often revealing. Travelling in the opposite direction, you see the same landmarks, the same landscape, but 180 degrees around. Sometimes familiarity is disappointing, nothing is new and there’s the boredom of a repetitive scene; long straight dusty roads punctuated with imperceptible corners leading to longer straighter, dustier roads. But sometimes it’s exciting to see things anew; details slowly emerge from the green speckled dirt – tree-covered hilltops and escarpments penetrate the vast bushland, like volcanic islands poking through the sea. With the sun at another angle, we can see that some of the abandoned wrecks of cars are decorated in paint. And, most importantly, the grader has made good progress; it feels like a whole different road, giving THE BENCH and our fillings a bit of a break.

There seem to be more side roads off this smoother main road, and after about an hour we come to our turning. We noticed this track on the way in to Wadeye and tried to peer along it, but a tantalising bend in the road obstructed the view. We follow Dennis’s hire car, trying to take things in. There’s a new and shiny-looking abattoir on the right hand side, a football oval shortly after on the left, then what looks like a warehouse but turns out to be a shop.

Opposite the shop is a pair of new-looking demountable houses, raised up off the ground with a breezeway between them – it’s the accommodation set-up for the government employees that feature in all of the indigenous communities that the Intervention has touched. It must have cost a fortune to install them all over the Northern Territory, but we discover that many of them have been condemned because of the toxic nature of some of the building materials. It’s not just ironic – the overcrowding in indigenous communities makes them seem like an offensive growth on the edge of town. Flash looking accommodation standing unused but full of expensive white goods. Another government masterstroke!

Bitumen roads – a luxury reserved for settlements’ internal surfaces  – lead around what looks like common ground. In the background appears to be a vast, almost luminescent green meadow, a welcome contrast to the dull ubiquitous grey-green leaves of the bush.It is in fact a wetland. An oasis teeming with birds. It reminds me of the billabongs we saw in Kakadu.

So, we’ve arrived at another place with two names. This is Palumpa. This is Nganmarriyanga.

Immediately we’ve cottoned on to a difference between this place and Wadeye. Activity. People are sweeping yards, pruning trees, generally keeping Nganmarriyanga spick and span. There are a couple of ancient and radically stripped-down 4×4s – roofs and windscreens removed, bodywork strengthened with thick steel supports like wrap-around bumpers and adorned with old tyres. The youth of Wadeye love their heavy metal, so is Nganmarriyanga the home of the Mad Max club?

It takes us a little while to find the people we’re here to see, but we find them eventually. A white troopcarrier full of men pulls up and a little tour begins. A small building that was part of the old abattoir houses the musical equipment – one of the guys has a go on the drums – then we head out to see the market garden alongside the river about 15 km down the road. Until a recent fire mangoes and melons were growing and supplying the local people and the shop in Wadeye. They’re hoping to resurrect it. We visit the school and meet some of the teachers who are planning a kitchen garden.

Over the day we find out what this place is all about. Families that were based in Wadeye moved back to the land they originally inhabited and set up a Cattle Station. The Station is called Palumpa, the community of 400-500 people is called Nganmarriyanga. There is no Mad Max cult, the strange cars are Buffalo catchers, used to round up the beasts for the abattoir. Brilliant!

This seems like a place where people make things happen and a place we could help. Most importantly the people want us to come. We discuss some ideas for projects and agree to go away to Darwin for a week to make preparations. Then we’ll come back and get things going.

Back in Darwin, we finally cracked. We’ve given in to the lure of air conditioning, privacy and the possibility of a lie-in and settled for a hotel. For the meantime, at least, there will be no more mosquito coils, camp stoves, tarpaulin. There will be no cooking by head torch, no treks to ablution blocks, no water fetching or breathing dust. Instead, the days have passed in a flurry of phone-calls, meetings, libraries, photocopying, printing and filing. Evenings have been even more novel. There’s been a cooker, a fridge, a sofa, television and even a bed.

The Bush is calling, and this time we’re going back with a purpose.

Empty accommodation

Hot and thirsty business

The Jatbula Trail is a hike very much more about the destinations along the way than the journey itself. It’s not that the walking is boring, though it is a little monotonous, but unlike some of the more famous ‘through walks’ we’ve enjoyed, there are few challenging hills, stark changes in vegetation or breathtaking vistas. Instead, Jatbula is about two things: heat and water. If you had one without the other it would be truly miserable, but together they work like a dream.

The walk is named for Peter Jatbula, one of the traditional owners who was instrumental in the decade long campaign to regain ownership of Nitmiluk. The walk takes the route that he and his family (for many generations) travelled through the incredible country. Ella walked the route a couple of years ago with her parents, but now we’ve walked it together.

There are two versions of the formation of the Nitmiluk landscape. The traditional owners’ explanation is that Bula, the rainbow serpent creation ancestor, carved the gorges out of the rocky country as he slithered through during Buwurr –  the eternal dreamtime. He’s still lurking, beneath the water at Butterfly Gorge, a place avoided by aboriginal people.

Modern science’s somewhat drier story tells us that the sandstone bedrock had folds, faults and fissures caused by earthquakes. These were filled with dolerite from lava flow, and over the millennia the tropical climate and gushing water has weathered these cracks into huge gorges.

Whichever rendition you prefer, there’s no doubting that the results are staggering: from above the landscape looks like a vast sandstone pavement, like the limestone pavements I’ve seen in the UK, but with humungous joints between the slabs that run for kilometres and flow with massive amounts of water even in the dry months.

Nitmiluk Gorge

You can’t just sling on a rucksack and mosey off on the 60 km Jatbula walk, however. First, a permit has to be filled by the Rangers on the same day that you set off. We received a lecture about the dangers of the conditions on the escarpment – for once it’s not crocs – and were told that we were silly for walking in September. “You should have come in June when it’s cooler.”

We weren’t about to chill our boots for nine months, of course. Awkward as ever we explained that we wanted to camp at different sites to a couple of those recommended (Ella had her favourite spots from the last walk ). Eventually we were able to convince them that we knew what we were doing and were ferried over the river to the start of the walk.

Heat

To say that the heat is oppressive is an understatement. It’s insidious and dominates everything, and we barely notice the ‘nit-nit’ noise of the cicadas that Nitmiluk is named for. On each of the four days we walked, by 9.30 am the temperature wedged itself above 30˚C and remained there until well after sundown. It hits you in waves through the air and emanates from everything in the environment. There are even noticeable differences between temperatures of different ground surfaces – calf-baking sand and lighter-coloured rock being awful to walk on.

To avoid the heat we’re up each morning before dawn’s even thought to crack, covered head to toe in lightweight clothing and eating breakfast on the move. The downside of this is that at 11 am I feel as sleepy as I did at 5.30 am.

Once the sun is fully stoked we begin operating like wind-up toys. A break for water re-winds our springs and over the next half hour our speed and activity gently slows until conversation dries up and we begin to flag. When possible a patch of shade is found in the scrub and we re-wind the key ready to trudge on.

Keeping cool

Fortunately the day walks aren’t too long and before lunch we’re hunkered down in a shady spot, beneath a rock or under the most essential piece of kit we carry – a lightweight tarpaulin. From here we recover by exploiting the second key characteristic of the walk.

Campsite at Crystal Falls

Water

The walk winds along the escarpment above Nitmiluk Gorge and runs up 17 mile creek and Edith River. Various campsites are located at exquisite swimming spots along these waterways, but between them there is often no water to be found. The waterholes are unbelievably excellent, not only visually – the patterns on the craggy red sandstone changing with the sun as the day gets longer – but because, aside from our own sweat, they offer the only relief from the heat.

Until I was nine I lived in an Essex village. Although it was part of the London commuter belt, it had something of an Olde England charm about it. A couple of old pubs, a twelfth century church, and a stream with a mill and a pond with bulrushes. I’m sure Constable would have loved it.

I remember a boy, who was several years older than me, drank from the stream. The water, or rather something in it, almost killed him – doctors had to restart his heart several times. He went on to become an excellent footballer and someone I really looked up to, but sadly he died in his early twenties. This is why I’ve always been wary of drinking water that isn’t specifically collected for the purpose.

So it takes me a while to get used to diving into the water fully clothed and drinking great gulps as I swim. But how liberating it is once I’ve succumbed.

Edith River in the afternoon

Evacuation

After an afternoon of climbing out of the water to some shelter, reading until we’ve dried out and then having another go, the landscape begins to change. The sun gets low and lends a soft angle to everything around, as if it’s being filtered through golden syrup. The grass that looked bleached the colour of straw is transformed to a dozen hues of green with horizontal bands of red.

On the plateau in the morning

The tropical malaise that’s affected even the flies recedes. The ground looks different: sand and dead leaves are still all around, but it’s alive with the constant electric activity of ants working at breakneck speed on their little projects – green ants, red ants, black ants, little ants, big ants, scurrying about their business. Eventually the earth finally rolls over and we find the energy to cook dinner.

And this is what we’re doing – lazing in the hour before sunset on the last night of the walk at the so well-named Sweetwater Pool – when a warning sign hovers over us. Along the walk we’d come through patches of burnt out scrub. In this part of the world they burn off the undergrowth in a patchwork rotation year after year to ensure against large fires. We’d seen several smouldering logs and thought nothing of it, but seeing Kites (the birds not the toys) circling above in groups suggests that there’s a fire nearby; they’re on the lookout for prey escaping from the edges of the flames. The stiff breeze that picked up in the afternoon must have re-ignited a fire. The wind was heading in our direction.

Ash remains of a burnt out tree

We ran to the top of the nearest hill to assess the distance of the fire. It looked close enough for discomfort and given that we were feeling refreshed, there was only an hour until dark, and it would be better to make a clean break immediately rather than spend the whole night wondering, we packed up. We trotted the last four kilometres out to the road and a managed campground at Edith Falls.

Too close for comfort

The campground manager reckoned the fire was probably six kilometres from where we’d been and very kindly waived the camping fees given the circumstances.

In the morning we had our very first go at hitch-hiking to get back to Katherine where we caught a bus to our car at Nitmiluk. Hitching in the Outback, I know, a horror story waiting to happen! Sadly for your reading experience, but gladly for us, the first people we asked – the very kind Ann(e?) and David from the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne – picked us up. We were in Katherine before the banks were open.

To Nitmiluk

Back in Darwin we spent a couple of days getting organised – Ella picked up new glasses, we restocked camping provisions and dropped in on ICV to see what projects might be coming up. While we were in town we noticed an advert for a free concert being held near Katherine at Nitmiluk National Park (aka Katherine Gorge National Park). This was good news for two reasons. Firstly, we’d heard great things about the band playing – the Black Arm Band (we missed their performance at the Darwin Festival because we were at Gunbalanya). Secondly, we were aiming to head for Nitmiluk anyway. At last all the ducks lined up!

The Black Arm Band is a collective of indigenous singers and musicians who perform along with a symphony orchestra. The free concert was held as part of twentieth anniversary celebrations of the handing back of the Nitmiluk area to the Jawoyn people.

We drove 300 km south a couple of days before the concert in order to check out some of the Park. Arriving at campgrounds in the dark is always tricky – slowly driving around trying to choose a decent site while everyone else is watching. Then waking up in the morning to find things look quite different and you’ve parked next to the big no camping sign and a lawn sprinkler and that’s why everyone was shooting daggers at you.

At the Nitmiluk campground even in the dark it was clear that circles of identical tents dominated a large area and it was set aside for a group. In amongst it all was a big screen playing a film – most unusual for a national park. I’ve camped at dozens of campgrounds in Australia, but they’re generally very white places. This was the first time I’ve seen aboriginals. Jawoyn people – particularly young kids, parents and grandparents – had arrived early for the weekend. Clearly the celebrations were going to be big.

We passed a couple of days in situ exploring the gorges and playing in the campground pool with the Jawoyn kids. It was great to see them charging around the pool and breaking nearly every rule on the signboard – running, jumping, bombing and shouting at the top of their lungs!

Troopy with a Jawoyn kids' (removable) paint job

On Saturday night we enjoyed the Black Arm Band’s performance. It was outside and intimate (like everything worth doing in the NT) in a little hollow at the picnic ground by the river: a beautiful setting for a mesmerising cycle of artists who took turns to front and provide backing vocals for each other.

Decoration at Black Arm Band gig

Before the gig there were a number of speeches outlining the importance of the handing back of the lands and what it has meant for the Jawoyn to have control over the management of the National Park. According to the local paper a government Minister put his foot in it by bringing up some of the ugly old issues that surrounded the hand back. However, we missed all of this because we were busy preparing our packs for the Jatbula Trail – the other key reason for visiting Nitmiluk, and the subject of the next post … coming up in a couple of days.

New ways of seeing

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Such was the suddenness of the transition it seemed like a dream: we were plucked from beneath the mosquito net in a tropical bush campsite, whisked through the air in a humming metal tube and dropped into seats around a table in an old pavilion – a former lawn bowls club – just boomerang’s throw from the Brisbane River.

If you know us at all, then you know that we’re not ‘into’ lawn bowls. The pavilion is the home of the Musgrave Park Cultural Centre and we were sitting around the table with twenty or so teachers, youth workers, lawyers, doctors, medical students, writers, business people and staff members from Indigenous Community Volunteers.

We used to live in Brisbane, but here was something I never saw, or never cared to notice: indigenous culture. I remember the sadness of seeing young aboriginal kids staggering across busy roads high on the petrol they were sniffing from bottles under their shirts, but once they were out of sight I suppose they were out of mind. The anonymity, or the rush and tumble, of urban life focussed us on our own lives, or at least provided an excuse to look at the surface and then look the other way.

Since coming to the Northern Territory we’ve had our eyes opened wider to the plight of many indigenous Australians. News reports, documentaries and films like Samson and Delilah can teach us about the issues, but there is no substitute for experience. Away from the cities, especially in the north, it’s impossible to ignore that Australia – a country that brands itself as a classless society – is riven with inequality.

Neither of us are particularly good at idle observation – why sit and watch when you can get up and join in yourself? We don’t want to travel to places and flit through without making an effort to understand them. I mentioned last time that we are interested in having a participatory experience with indigenous Australians. We have time and skills, and we also have a compulsion to actually do something.

Indigenous Community Volunteers (ICV) is a not-for-profit organisation that works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – not for them or on them. They utilise funds from government grants and donations to operate projects in indigenous communities across Australia. Importantly, the projects are suggested by the communities rather than imposed upon them. ICV support them to scope the projects and then match volunteers, people like us, from their database.

We had heard of ICV before, but Ella chanced across their office in Darwin, wandered in and learnt a bit more. We applied to be volunteers and within a couple of weeks were in Brisbane for our induction.

The two days were jammed with talks from aboriginal community members, presentations from staff (indigenous and otherwise), insightful DVDs, and discussions and exercises that improved our understanding of the cultural practices we are likely to encounter ‘in the field.’ Along the way we tried to find space in our bellies for the huge quantities of food supplied by the cultural centre, whilst being careful to leave a little room for a lot of laughing.

Ella and I are often sceptical about the role of ‘aid.’ However well-intentioned it is there is often a patronising or even imperialistic nature beneath the surface of the offer. Aid is given with conditions – to make you more like us or even to make you beholden to us. At the workshop we were taught to accept other cultures for what they are, so we felt it might be a little ironic that outsiders go in as agents of change. I suppose the key is to help improve conditions without eroding culture. To be sure that we’re getting into something we feel happy about we submitted the staff to a barrage of confronting questions, so much so that I apologised for my ‘difficult wife’ (tongue in cheek) to the organisers at the end of the workshops.

…………

I’m a great believer in stories. We learn through stories – morals, humour, understanding are gained from sharing experiences. I can make a judgement about a general situation or circumstance, but after hearing a person’s story of their experience I can suddenly have a different understanding, a new way of seeing the same issue.

Storytelling was rife over the two days. The experiences of ICV employees and other volunteers entwined themselves around the lessons we learned, supporting and embellishing the impressions and generalisations. Appropriate preparation indeed for life in a storytelling culture. For me this was more than just the icing on the cake. It helped the bridge in my mind between my culture and others, and it reinforced the fact that although we might have slight differences in our cultures, those differences are exceptions. We are extremely similar.

In the evening, sitting around a fire, an older aboriginal lady sang us her songs and told us the stories of her life. Few eyes were dry by the time she finished talking, but there were many laughs along the way – seeing the funny side of things is clearly an effective coping mechanism. As a member of the Stolen Generation, she was taken from her family in Western Australia as a three-year-old, dislocated from her culture and brought up as a white child. She’s suffered great pain from separation, discrimination, abuse – pain of the kind that never truly goes away. As an adult she was reunited with her family but she struggled to reconnect to her people and her culture. An immensely strong woman with a smile that lit up a dark night, now she sings, paints and tells her stories to overcome the pain. I hope one day you’ll hear her stories for yourself, so, out of respect, I won’t share any more.

Stories often have the greatest impact when we identify with the issues they raise, and as I listened to this woman certain elements of her stories tugged at me, reminding me of stories I heard from my own family history. At the end of the evening I told her about how genocide affected my ancestors, and of the prejudice my immigrant grandmothers faced when they came to England after the war. She really appreciated this, and I realised more than ever that if we share stories between cultures there is hope that we can understand one another.

…………

As part of this adventurous journey we had hoped to minimise our environmental impact, avoiding the use of aeroplanes and living simply. We don’t believe in carbon offsetting but we’re hoping that the trade-off of the flights to and from Brisbane will be the empowerment of others to create sustainable lives for their people. We’re flying back to Darwin soon and hope to find a suitable project to help out with through ICV. With the permission of whichever community we arrive in I will hopefully be able to let you know more about it. Stay tuned!

I’m afraid that there’s no new photos to show off for once, but for those of you who can’t cope without pretty pictures Ella’s Dad has given us a cracking photo of a possum in his garden. Somehow it got into the middle of a very prickly miniature date palm. We hope this isn’t a metaphor for our future volunteering experience!

Possum in a prickly place