I'm on my annual visit to the Qantas Club, eating pretty average sandwiches and wondering if the Sydney plane will be late, courtesy of the cyclone winds around our southern border. There might be time for a quick Christmas eve blogpost, methinks.
Over the past week or so, I have been following the hearing for a murder that happened in Alice earlier this year. As I'm hoping to write something more formally elsewhere about it later, I won't comment much now. It's a fairly unusual case, which involves people from both sides of the racial divide in town. The mood has seemed fairly sombre; I'm not sure if this is a reflection of the fact that I've been in the courtroom for about a week brooding about local issues or if people generally feel the heaviness of this case. It's been all over the local papers, but didn't (interestingly) rate much of a mention in the national media. Two men have also been fatally stabbed at a local community (local as in 200 km out of town).
There have also been a lot of Aboriginal people on the streets. I'm not exactly sure why. Sometimes there's an influx into town at this time of year, as people come to catch up with family before going out onto the Lands for Law and Culture. It's also thought that people come up here to drink, as there are bans on drinking down south at Port Augusta over Christmas. I almost ran over a young man staggering across the road last night, a can held to his face. He was wearing dark clothes and almost impossible to see in the night (no, I wasn't drinking myself). I couldn't quite see whether he was sniffing or drinking from the can. I thought it looked like a VB can, and it's more likely that he would have been drinking, given the number of liquor outlets in my area, tho I have seen at least one sniffer wandering down the road before.
This morning, as I was standing outside the Gapview hotel, waiting for the airport shuttle, I saw minibuses of Aboriginal people being offloaded, presumably to start drinking in the pub (this was at about 10.30 am). The bottleshop opens at 2 pm. Truly, as the saying goes, the town operates on the Aboriginal dollar: the taxi companies, the hoteliers, and well, us in the local service industry. Happy Alice. I wish I had something more positive to say. It's also been about 40 C for the last two days, which has added to the burdensome atmosphere. I could see rain in the distance all around town, the dregs of the cyclone storms apparently, but none made it into town. However, the heat and humidity seem to have broken and the sky was overcast today, bringing out the subtle pastel tones in the landscape. (Gotta go now; it seems the plane is on time after all!)
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