The View from Elsewhere

the last post

This is the last post of this blog, the one-thousandth post (yes: and there’s more, but not for long).  When I saw it was coming up a few months ago, I decided it would be the final one.  I was hoping to post it in April, six years after I started blogging, but other things like life got in the way.

It's important for me to sign off on this blog, because it's marked an significant chapter of my life. I'm a bit wary of repeating some of the material from recent posts (another reason to stop blogging), though I feel in need of closure.  I set out originally write an aide-memoire, of living in Alice Springs, and that's what provided the narrative trajectory for the View, as much as it's possible for a blog to have one. As far as I know, this is the longest running blog about life in the Territory and possibly the first blog about Alice Springs.

Many unexpected things came out of my time in the Territory, and also from blogging.  It’s often the things that you don’t predict in life that turn out to be the best.  One aspect of blogging I’m loathe to leave behind is its unexpected serendipity (much and all as I hate that word, along with ‘synergy’)…almost everything I’ve had published that originated in a blogpost, I didn’t set out to write as a piece for publication.  It just took on its own life.  I may find I miss this unexpected freefall into creative recesses too much to stop blogging altogether, and start a new blog...who knows?  I’ll post a link here or propagate it through facebook, if I do.

I'm now ‘unexpectedly’ back here in Melbourne, comfortable as a pig-in-muck in the golden triangle of Northcote-Clifton Hill-North Fitzroy, eating far too much food, buying too many cold-weather clothes (tho the Kmart long-sleeved numbers I’d been wearing for three years were never going to cut it in the Melbourne winter).  I feel that ultimately I’ll make my base here, tho I’ll continue to dip in and out of the Territory.  I’ve noticed that although people often return to Alice the first couple of years after leaving the place, gradually they move on.  Amongst the expats I know, there seem to be two types, often represented in a couple: one who yearns to be back in central Australia, the other who might look back fondly, but sees the urban life as their true modus operandi.  I suspect I’m more the latter type, although Alice made me more of a convert to the regional life than I ever expected to be.  I’d try the regional life again, though maybe on the coast or somewhere wet and misty, like Tasmania.

One of the deal-breakers for me was realizing how quickly the turn-over people — i.e. expats — occurred.  Long-term Alice residents would comment on how they saw whole groups of people go, and I stayed there long enough to see ten of my friends leave within eighteen months…virtually a whole social network.  Up until that point, I was relishing the regional life…until I realized how unstable it could be in Alice.

I saw that I would have to go through the whole death and rebirth cycle with people, over and over again in Alice, and more quickly…and that the new people in town were getting younger and younger, as I got older and older.  After about three years, you also start to become distant from your circles of friends elsewhere, and to miss out on some of the important events in their lives and vice-versa, those things that often make for long-term bonding experiences.  So I thought I’d see what it was like to return.

   Alice is a place of extremes — of climate, of distance, of personalities, of social privilege, of racial divides.  The sense of being confronted regularly by some basic issues of human need, survival and even hatred, as well as constantly being made aware of the cycle of life — how tenuous things could be — was ultimately wearing for me.  You’re also less cushioned from harsh realities: shopping at Kmart and Target, arthouse cinema once a week and two cafes that make decent coffee are pretty much the mainstay fleshpots on offer in Alice.

Having said that, I don’t at all regret having thrown up the cards to go to Alice six years ago.  It’s surely been one of the signature experiences of my life. But I don’t regret having thrown up the cards yet again to return to Melbourne.

road trip

I'm sitting in the Olive Pink Gardens (view from Annie Meyer Hill right), eating my last bigilla before I head off on a road trip.  That's right: how could I road trip begin without a fortifying breakfast. 

The past week or so, a refrain of 'road trip, road trip' has been going in my head...now faced with the reality, I feel a little subdued.  There has been a weekend of brunching and de-cluttering. The cats made themselves scarce, especially once the Dreaded Camping Gear appeared. That is, except for the Ancient Princess, who's scarcely aware of anything except the next feed (her hearing may have gone, but her sense of smell hasn't). 

I've been given various sage pieces of advice about the trip south -- how it will clear my mind, lift the tension from my shoulders, help me to think in longer arcs.  All of that.  We'll see.  I think it's a fitting way to ease myself out of the Centre: gradually.  The other thing is: talking books.  A road trip is always a great opportunity to fill your mind with longer narratives you wouldn't usually get a chance to read.

 Over the past few days, I've run into some of the personalities I met when I first came to town ...in the way that one does in Alice (not always a welcome experience), but also fortuituously, like the rounding off of loose ends in a mini-series or like the re-appearance of obscure earlier characters at the end of a Dickens novel. One of the local identities I ran into was the 'desert queen', who brought me here (pictured left).  When I told her I was travelling south, she said, 'Ah, you won't last in the Big Smoke.  You'll be back.'

I had hoped to leave town before 9.30 am...it's now almost 10.00 am.  I guess there's no screaming hurry to reach Coober Pedy tho I'd rather arrive before it gets dark (except to miss all those potholes).   No, the cats aren't coming with me.  I'm not that mad -- not driving 2,500 km with cats.  I am driving the Getz, which has raised some eyebrows amongst my male friends, but I'm sure the Getz is up to it.

Anyway, I'm for the open road:

 

the woman of the cattery

Just had a telecanvasser:

Her: Can I speak to the Man of the House?

Me: There isn't one. Are you a telecanvasser?

Her: Am I speaking to Mrs Elsewhere?

Me: No, you're speaking to Ms Elsewhere and this has been a fairly sexist telecanvassing session so far.

Her: What?  This is not sexist.

Me: Yes, it is.  [Slams down phone]

Phone ring again.  Pulls connection out of wall.

Thinks:  She's probably calling from Singapore...descending into my own generalisations here.

Thinks again: What kind of a sad, mad, unreconstituted relic am I?  Have I been too long in Alice?

Of course, there is always Otty, who thinks he's the Man of the House, but he's too shy to talk on the phone.

this floating life

Yesterday, the cats and I packed into a life-raft fashioned from plastic tubes filled with lentils, almonds and raisins, and set forth on the ever-burgeoning Todd for Adelaide.  In case you fear for our collective welfare, we were all wearing flotational vests crocheted from ininti seeds, although one feline certainly didn't need it; indeed, the tortoiseshell blimp has proved useful as a buoy on occasion.  

We floated past the Brewers Industrial Estate just after midnight; we hope to make the Marla Roadhouse by noon, then negotiate the currents eddying from potholes at Coober Pedy before arriving in the River Torrens for the opening of the Adelaide Arts Festival.

The Todd, before we left (actually, on my last bike ride, snatched before the floods on Friday afternoon):

Emily Gap (somewhat unfocussed iphone photo: it was raining):

  

Seriously, the rain has poured down fairly constantly over the past few days.  It's a pleasant novelty to fall asleep listening to the rain, tho I do wince when it starts teeming, as I live in the flood zone.  Still holding out here, hoping the puddles won't up to the door, though it's pretty swampy outside my back gate.

Otherwise, drinks at Crowne on Friday night, then a weekend of de-cluttering, writing and DVD-watching, tho it might just be de-cluttering today, as the power has been off for a couple of hours.  It once went off for a couple of days after some stormy weather (the solution is to boot-up the laptop in a cafe with power).

Last night, as I went into Blockbuster, some Aboriginal men drinking in a car outside called out, 'Hello gorgeous!'  Only weeks, maybe even days left of these interesting cross-cultural experiences.  The Blockbuster car park isn't a usual drinking spot (in fact, I'm surprised they could get away with it).  I suspect they're out-of-towners, here for the NAB match between the Pies and the Crows, which I missed as I was drinking on the other side of town myself.  Apparently the match was pretty swampy; I've seen it so many times now not to be disappointed by missing this annual Alice event.  Anyway, I may soon have the opportunity for more interesting cross-cultural footy experiences.

In the new releases section of the DVD store, I saw some copies of In Tranzit, which as I understand it is an indie film about German POWs in a Soviet transit camp after WWII.  It features John Malkovich and Vera Parmigiana or whatever her name is, who was so good in Up in the Air...but more excitingly for me, I know one/have been taught by of the writers. True, I know/have been taught by some writers of Australian films, but it was a first for me to be able to say that about an international film. Needless to say, I didn't borrow it, I was brought up on a staple diet of WWII stories and have to steel myself to read/watch any more and I was In Search of Something Light, as one invariably is in Alice. But it's made it to Alice, so perhaps another time...

sleeping with bears

On Sunday morning, I caught up with the not-so-speedies (a ka: the ‘slowpokes’).  For those not in the know, this is a consortium of peoples who prefer to ride at an average speed of 23 kmh.  This coalition of the unwilling was started by my dear friend L, who was disquieted by the constant 30 + kmh speeds of the bike club’s Sunday Social Ride, as opposed to the advertised average of 27 kmh.

I told L I might come if I woke up in time. (Actually, there are a lot of ‘L’-friends in my life, and their names often do start with ‘L’ – ha!).  The biggest hitch was the meeting time of 6 am, but there were some good reasons to join them.  It’s hotter earlier at this time of year, and the last time I joined the Sunday Social Ride, they wore me out, as I’m not ‘bike fit’ enough to deal with the speeding.

Much to the not-so-speedies’ surprise, I did wake in time (it’s also very bright early in the day this year) and joined them.  We rode about 40 km at 25 kmh, amid protests that I had raised their overall average speed.  However, they did get to use me as a windbreak. 

Out riding, I was reminded by how seductive the embrace of the Centralian landscape can be early in the morning: the quietude, the gentle light picking out pastel tones.  Holed up in my air-conditioned bunker over summer, I had begun to forget what the place could be like.

   There were only three of us slowpokes on the ride, though many others passed us on the way, evidently with the same idea of catching the cool of the day.  Afterwards, we – L, the Gavster and I — had coffee in the Mall while the marketers were still setting up their stalls.  It was almost impossible for me to imagine I was up so early, as indeed it was for my companions (mind you, I felt like falling asleep for the rest of the day).  

Gav, in particular, couldn’t get over the fact that I was actually there, given my aversion to earliness and my peripatetic lifestyle.  At one point, L related a travel tale about a friend who had been ‘sleeping with bears’ while camping in the States.

‘Can you imagine that?’ she said.  ‘I can’t imagine camping with bears.  Would you camp near bears?’

‘No,’ said Gav, ‘But I can imagine texting El and finding that she was sleeping with bears.  I’m always getting messages: “Sorry, can’t ride with you, I’m in Timbuktu” or “I’m in Alaska”.  Next thing you know, she'll be texting to say that she's "sleeping with bears".’

Well, more like penguins in Tasmania or Mormons in Utah… We also talked about Alice, what a good but difficult place it was to live, and where we might go next.  ‘Alice’ is such a common topic of conversation amongst those who live here, it’s hard to know why (apart from the obvious ‘resonances’), but maybe it’s because everything is so far away.  So many residents are expats too and there’s such a great sense of transience that the place naturally becomes a point of discussion and comparison itself.

 L had always wanted to live in the centre, and had cast an anchor over the side here after travelling round the country with her ex.  Gav, it seemed, was gradually travelling north from Tasmania, and planned to head further north, to the Kimberley perhaps, in hope of better fishing prospects.

L asked Gav if he’d seen any of the film festival or if he intended seeing anything.  She handed him a flyer, and he scanned it and said, ‘No, and the only film I’d want to see has already been on.’

‘Oh, The Fox and the Child!’ I said.

‘That’s the one!’ Gav turned to L.  ‘You see, El knows me so well she knows which film I’d pick.  It’s because it's about the innocence of childhood, and my childhood was disturbed, so I like to see things like that.’

And not only that, but hence the long journey north, further and further from Tasmania.

a mixed bag

There’s nothing decent on TV and Quickflix have sent me something I’ve already seen, so I feel a blogpost is upon me.

My evenings this weekend were taken up by watching Flickerfest, which used to look like this when it visited Alice, but now sadly, no more. 

It’s a shame, because the outdoor atmosphere with people kicking back on swags under the stars and Aboriginal people sneaking in round the edges was really very Alice.  There were fears of rain and valuable prints being wrecked it seemed, so the outdoor thing didn’t happen this year.  Numbers seemed down, quite possibly because of the loss of sense of idiosyncratic occasion. 

Flickerfest is always a bit of a mixed bag.  Over the last couple of years, I’ve felt it’s improved.  Often one or two nights will be good; the others less so and it’s hard to predict which one.  I think this is partly due to the nature of the beast: short films are difficult in the way that short stories are, of providing that pithy focus on an event or experience.  I tend to prefer the longer shorts (i.e. 20 mins) with more narrative, though a long short that’s badly done can be painful.

This year, surprisingly, the Australian film night was the best.  I say surprisingly because the Australian shorts have usually been amongst the worst over the past few years. There was a while there when pretty much every Australian short seemed to be a clumsy, over-obvious number about refugees, which was oh so tedious. (I’m someone who’s been overexposed to PC issues through work, but surely others secretly found this trying.  I remember watching a ‘refugee’ film with a bunch of dentists a couple of years ago, and one of them said to me, ‘People don’t speak like this, do they?’  You may be able to fool bureaucrats but you can’t fool the film-watching general public…they watch too many films.) 

So, anyway, thank God there were no refugee films and let’s just hope that the period of over-egged ideological earnestness is over in Australian film, what with the new Screen Australia and what seems like a focus on genre (tho that emphasis could also be about market second-guessing).  It could also be that with the Howard government gone, there are less obvious political issues to make dramas about, thank goodness.

I particularly liked Celestial Avenue, a film about a woman who unexpectedly finds love on a blind date in Chinatown and Franswa Sharl, about a twelve-year-old boy who wins a beauty pageant on a family holiday to Fiji.  And the Cat’s Piano cartoon, in which a giant piano hits nails into cats’ tails to make sounds.  All comedies: I want to be entertained.  There were some good Aboriginal films, especially local filmmaker Dena Curtis’s Jacob, which powerful in its portrayal of the impact of the birth of a fairer skinned child to Aboriginal parents.

So Flickerfest: bring back the swags, I say!

(And who supplies the slices?  Why are they always the same?  I’ve been every year to Flickerfest for six years, and they’ve always had the macadamia slice, the coconut caramel one and the chocolate one.  I’ve never seen them anywhere else on sale in Alice.)

In other news: I saw Bran Nue Dae with some friends the other night, and it was much fun.  Everyone was greatly relieved to have a non-bleak Aboriginal film.  I don't think everyone's in denial out here about how bad things are (tho it's possible to be numbed by too much exposure).  It's more that it was great to have a film that embraced the better side of human relations and showcased the rightly celebrated Aboriginal sense of humour.  Also great to see that exotic far-western port, Broome, up on the screen.

bitten

Yesterday, I was most heinously bitten by a dog on the thigh while I was riding on a mountainbike path (n.b.: not a footpath or a bushwalking track).  It was some kind of whitish terrier thing, which first mouthed my feet on the pedals then leapt up and started biting me on the outer thigh.

I yelled at the girl who was walking the dog and another off the leash, asking her to curb and discipline her dog.  I felt a bit guilty about this, as I would love nothing more than to have a little dog running alongside me while I'm biking through the bush.  But it seems there's always some namby-pamby hippy chick tripping along the mountainbike trail with a semi-civilised dingo-cross, rescued from a remote community, singing out, 'Don't worry, he won't hurt you!'  I mean, don't people know the limits of their animals' personalities, their likely behaviour, and discipline accordingly? 

This woman was apologetic enough.  Other people have argued back and told me off for inciting their dog...one even refused to put the dog back on its leash after it had bitten me.  I've only actually ever been bitten by whitefella housedogs.   I've been chased and mouthed by camp dogs, but never bitten by one...However, I wouldn't put it past them: three people/corpses have been mauled by camp dogs here over the past couple of years.

I have been moved almost by this incident to put pen to paper and write to the Advocate, complaining about the romanticisation of the canine in central Australia.  All this could be a diversion from the writing I'm meant to be doing this weekend. Or the housework, come to think of it.

I tried to photograph my leg last night, but was unable to get quite the focus, the drama, the bruising, the puncture marks (the outer thigh's a bit difficult).  It just looks like a lump of meat, adorned with a few pin pricks:

 

None of my wounds (usually from bike stacks) have photographed that well. More happily, here's Lulu, trying to shoot the breeze.   

Now that the weather has cooled (i.e. to 36 C), the cats have joined me downstairs where it's cooler, whereas they preferred to be upstairs where it's stinking hot on 40 + C days.

There's been a lot of indignant purring and yowling.  I think they really do hold me responsible for the weather.

hot wind

And so, after about five days straight of 40 C-ish weather, it is still officially too hot to sit on the balcony in the evenings, without rivulets of sweat dripping off one’s being, so we are sitting inside downstairs, without the aircon going (tho the portable’s going upstairs for the cats). It's also too hot too work in my study, so I've been parked pretty much at the dining room table over the last week.  My lips are so permanently dried and chapped, it’s become a state of being, along with a kind of blistex reflex. My Anangu calendar describes it as uterne mpepe or middle summer: 

Hot wind begins to blow from the northwest, we call that the bad wind, making people tired and irritable.  It may bring rain clouds, thunder and lightning.

Otherwise, I have decided I don’t mind this time of year.  One of the good things about the extreme heat is that it gives you an excuse to withdraw inside and contemplate.  Added to this is the relative lack of people in town, quietness on the workfront and the sense that the year hasn’t booted up yet.  It seems fitting to have this regular cycle, the feeling of the sloughing off the old, especially after the craziness and busyness of the previous season.  I wonder how we would fare psychologically without some regular sense of beginning, middle and end to each year.

I feel the new year doesn’t really start until around Australia Day/Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Day, as people go back to work and kids to school.  There’s still a sense of reprieve, of hopeful foreboding about what the new year might bring: as in, please let it be better than 2009.  Most people I know seem united in having found the year of the ox or the water buffalo or whatever it was to be hard-going. 

Apart from being extremely turgid work and otherwise for me, it was the year of the crazy random encounter (you mean, the crazy drunken encounter - Ed).  Although this made for some entertaining dinner party stories later, to be honest, it’s not really my style, and the troughs could have been leavened by some more reliable plateaus and less erratic peaks.  So, I’m hoping for less craziness, less turgidity in 2010 (a rather well-rounded and even-looking number, after all).

But there’s bad news for some of us, acc to Mystic Medusa, if you want to go with Chinese astrology.  Apparently the Year of the Tigger is about to start soon, in keeping with my theory that the year doesn’t really begin until Feb:

If you are born in the year of the Monkey, Tiger or Snake or have them anywhere in your Four Pillars chart it is best to wear a pig pendant for the whole of 2010 as it will help to harmonise any challenges you may experience, as you may find 2010 more challenging than previous years. 

Jeepers, how does she come up with this stuff?  I love MM as the Thinking Woman’s Astrologer, but sometimes…(I mean, moi wearing a pig pendant?)

And new year's resolution: no more shoes.  I think I have enough of them.  I could go another pair of office trousers or a warm jumper for winter, but shoes I don't need.

Suddenly there’s wind tossing the tree-tops outside.  How appropriate, after several days of heat and stillness, and more to the point, consulting the Anangu calendar.  Hopefully, there’ll be thunder and rain soon as well.  Oh, now there's lightning, so time to stop blogging before I get electrocuted.  

yes, Martin, it's been raining in Alice

        

 

a little conversation

I am at the point of my saga-some Xmas/NYE tour of the east coast where I become so paralytic with tiredness, I can hardly type.  I’ve just gone Katoomba-Melbourne-Sidders in a very short period of time.  I spent last night sleeping in a room the size of a cupboard last night: a cupboard is all I’m up to, at the moment.  I often have a preference for dives when travelling, as long as they’re clean.  I think the smallness of their rooms means less external stimulation so it’s easier to sleep.

As I commented in FB, I’ve been sitting in Potts Point next to a table with yummie-mummies in designer label tops, talking about life’s privations.  I’d forgotten these people existed.  They used to come out at a certain time (9-11 am) on the streets of Balmain when I lived there.  This pair has been talking about talking about the need for 'a safe space for women -- to work out while their kids are in childcare' – i.e. a kind of gym-cum-childcare centre (other forms of exercise – walking, cycling, swimming, etc – aren’t good enough, apparently).   I would have thought gyms with childcare facilities abounded in Sydney.  In Alice Springs, a safe place for women is one where they don’t get bashed.

God, I’m such an inverse snob.  It’s not that there aren’t women whose conversations are mainly about gymming and kids in Alice, tho they’re a lot less upwardly mobile.  This kind of stuff makes me wonder whether I’m going potty: which surreal reality –- Potts Pt mums or disenfranchised Aboriginal women -- is the more real.

Having just flitted between Sydney and Melbourne, a little surreal in itself, I’ve found myself drawn into the Sydney versus Melbourne game, of weighing up the various pro’s and con’s.  It’s a boring parlour game to be sure, which today goes something like this: Sydney – more raffish, more racy, yet more blatantly racist.  Melbourne – more cultural, more socially aware yet more parsimonious, etc.  Etc, etc, etc.  I’m sure Melbourne has its own soma-taking yummie-mummie brigade anyway.

But swayed me more towards Melbourne over the last couple of days is that they have the ‘little conversation’, a transaction in which totally strangers (e.g. vendors and customers) sometimes acknowledge each other’s existence. While I was trying to choose a slice at Melb airport (see FB post), a cleaner came up to me and said, ‘People often go for XX but I recommend YY.’ (No, nothing to do with Mendelian genetics.)  I reckon this would almost never happen in Sydney, tho I did used to have the little conversation with shopkeepers I came to know in Balmain.  People tend to glower at you if smile at them on public transport or swap pleasantries in exchange for service in Sydney. 

The upside of Sydney…high humidity.  My skin suddenly looks like it did 6 years ago, instead of something that would look more appropriate on one of the inmates of Eric Worrell’s Reptile Park.