The View from Elsewhere

six years in the Springs

It's the sixth anniversary of my move to the Springs, so I'm all set here to say something meaningful about it, although now that I come down to the crunch, I can find little to say.  I could say something humorous about cycling, like 'who would have ever thought I would have become a crack mountainbiker?'  Or about writing, like 'who would have ever thought I'd go off to the US of A to study creative non-fiction?'  (Who would have ever thought I'd write a screenplay, either?)

I do remember that on my very first day here, it was 37 C.  It was strobe-light bright: something that's hard to convey unless you've been here (it really does seem brighter many than other places, even in the winter).  On my first day I also went to one of those shops that sells surfwear (yes, even in the desert) and bought a pair of shorts for ten dollars.  And I've never looked back ever since.

This is what I wrote a few minutes ago, without putting any thoughts in:

Seriously

I'm still chewing it over...

Now for some thoughts:

Alice, would I have had it any other way?  And would I have ever imagined that I would be a six-year person here, after all my early speculations about how long I would stay in the place?

Seriously, in the last week I've been to several things that have made me think what an amazing place Alice is.  I went to an exhibition of art put on by the Women's Shelter, then to the Papunya Tula annual exhibition.  At the latter exhibition, I learned about a significant artist and community leader who'd been denied renal treatment in the Territory because it will no longer treat patients from interstate.  

So I contacted the Purple House, who publicised his dilemma, and they invited me to visit. The Purple House runs a dialysis service that caters to Aboriginal patients from the western and central deserts, people who travel hundreds of kilometres to receive treatment in Alice, because it's closer than Perth, etc, and they feel more comfortable here for various reasons.  Behind this organisation and the others that I've mentioned above are stories about incredible determination to do something in response to a situation or a problem.  

I've also been interviewing people for the book I'm trying to write, and over and over again, I've been struck by the spirit and determination, the entrepreneurialism that people often show when they set out on some business venture or cause in central Australia.

I'm not going into detail now, because I'm planning to write and publish on these themes in greater depth some day, but I'm still musing on some of the connections between these places and events. (I mean, how often do you hear the words 'Sothebys' and 'dialysis' in the same sentence?) It's been said that Alice is built on the Aboriginal dollar, and it's true that the Aboriginal industry is never too far from any venture here or rationale for doing things.  It's a bit of a truism, of course, that all Australia is built on the back of Aboriginal people.  But here, the truth of that is never far from the surface.

I had a conversation with Barista a few months ago, in which he said something like he couldn't imagine that Alice would be very spiritually sustaining, something like that.  I'm still chewing it over...  I know what he meant, or at least I think I do: there aren't the cultural and social resources that a city like Melbourne has. (On the other hand, I would struggle to put 'Sydney' and 'spiritual' in the same sentence, tho one has to welcome the irreverence of Sydney-siders at times.) Alice is spiritually challenging, but is it nourishing?  I'm not sure.

The thing about Alice is that it brings you closer to the reality of things.  There are problems living here that largely relate to distance: a lot of the issues surrounding 'sea change' locations are compounded, and then there's the whole layer of overt racism on top of things.  As someone observed to me today, the desert people here are 'a minority colonised in their own country within a short period of time'.  

But for all that, the place seems more real, more attuned to the cycle of life and death.  The potential harshness and brevity of things.  I often wonder how much this place has gotten under my skin: if I leave, will I always be drawn back to the centre?  How much would I think about it?  Would the memories slowly fade or immediately disappear, as if I'd been living in a fold in time and returned like some Rip Van Winkle-type stranger to civilisation?  Truly I expect memories of Alice to have more traction than those of other places.

Do I regret coming here?  Not for a minute or a heartbeat.

the community match

A couple of days before the beginning of the football season, people start milling in the area where I live near Heavitree G*p. starts. The football season draws people from communities into town to watch their friends and relatives play. Most of the teams are from Aboriginal communities in the central desert region, though recently some sides from town have been admitted to the competition. The G*p is one of those areas where out-of-towners like to camp and drink. It’s close to the T%dd River, a favourite place to doss down, despite criticism from local traditional owners. And it’s an easy walk up G*p Road to Tr%ger Park Oval, where the community matches are played on the weekend during Autumn.

One Sunday afternoon, I decide to walk up G*p Road to see a match. Normally I would drive or ride, even to the local shop. Apart from a desire to save time or to avoid the extremes of the weather, I don’t like spending too much time in the vicinity of G*p Road, as it has a reputation for occasional violent incidents. But walking this route, I see more than I have before on my bike or from my car.

post-Festival blogging

Unbelievably, she starts blogging about teh Adelaide Writers Week a month after the event.

I stayed in a motel about ten minutes bus-trip from the CBD, the best wotif could find for me in the heavily booked festival season.  It bore the name of a Spanish medieval city and was like something from Mulholland Drive -- nondescript, shabby and suburban, with an eerie sense of possibility.

My room was long, narrow and low-slung with an excellent dining room size table beneath a wide window overlooking the courtyard.  I marvelled at the mould embedded in the bedroom carpet and the bathroom's grout.  We don't have such things in Alice, nor do we have fleas (not that there were any at the motel).  I do like a good dive. I do think they're more conducive to writing and studying than almost anywhere else

Every morning I got up at 7 am, bought a coffee from the bakery across the road, did a couple of hours writing for my 'packet' at the excellent table, watching the goings-on in the courtyard, usually a slow ebb of Fijian? Indians (the place seemed to be run by them) and people like my parents.

Then I caught the bus into town for the excellently-timed Writers Week, which started every morning at 10.00 am rather than some ungodly hour like things in the Territory. The organisers obviously had writers and people who like writing in mind when they set the program.

The Writers Week is part of the Adelaide Arts Festival and Adelaide, for the uninitiated, is the perfect-sized city for a festival.  What struck me as a condescending Sydneysider on my first visit to Adelaide was how easily one could drive to the edge of the city and see it in its entirety (or so it seemed: I was only 14 at the time).  But its compactness means that it's easy to navigate as a visitor but that it's also big enough and organic enough (unlike other regional cities such as Canberra) to have a sense of a life of its own.  On the other hand, Adelaide has a reputation for weirdness: murderous rampages through the zoo, old-school tie conservatism juxtaposed with being one of the first place to give women the vote and so on (I think I might have said something similar last time I posted about Adelaide, so I won't harp on about this.  Besides, Adelaideans might be reading).

well, that's over for now

I don't know if anyone's still reading this blog, but if you are, I wrote the posts below originally as part of a 'packet' (US writing courses require 'packets' of work, don't ask me why) for Gopher, in which I was required to do some reportage/observational writing about Aboriginal people.  The quality of writing was not important; what was important was simply talking to Aboriginal people about their daily lives.  Some of my friends laughed about this exercise -- 'oh, you're going off to talk to blackfellas again!' -- and said I looked like a shady art-dealer when they saw me leaning against a pole near some Abl artists in the Mall.

Some comments: although most of the conversations I had were superficial, it was a lot easier to approach and talk with most Aboriginal people (as in bush people or 'itinerants') than I would have thought.  I tried to offset the less culturally-sensitive interrogative aspects of a reportage approach by just sitting in the same space and observing things instead.

What I found on the whole were ordinary people, simply going about their everyday lives. Most striking was the strange sense of divorce between the black and white populations, brought out in the way that both inhabit the same spaces in close proximity without even acknowledging each other. While this was something I had long observed about Alice, it seemed all the more striking given how easy it was to talk to most Aboriginal people.  I tend to relate this to some form of internalisation of the policies of segregration, such as the 'two-mile law' restricting the black population's access to the town's centre till the late sixties.  The sheer fear or perception of 'difference' doesn't seem to be enough, given the way that very different populations will interact more directly in other spaces, though in urban areas this may be due to forced proximity.  (I find much of the 'whiteness' theory melodramatic and suspect it's something more for armchair academics.)

In other news: I feel as though I've been on the run over the past three weeks.  I've gone from a week in Adelaide, to another back teaching in Alice, to yet another teaching up at Bumbledore.  I'm still in Darwin.  And I haven't even got up to reporting on the Adelaide Writers Week.

In some ways, I've been avoiding e-stuff, because it can feel like such a time-drain. Once you've spent a couple of hours on the internet, you think, well, I could have spent that time writing or doing teaching prep.  On the other hand, blogging, etc, can provide a valuable form of community or communication.  (Sorry about the trite stuff; I've had a couple of red wines.)

So muchos apologios for my silence/absence;  I will be back in the 'real world', wherever that may be soon.  I think.

the match II

I leave Max and his family and go back to the fenced-in area to by a beer. While I’m there, I get talking to a couple of guys wearing fluorescent vests emblazoned with ‘Centre Labour Force’. They look like they’re of Indigenous descent, and quite probably townies.

They also look like they’re security people, but they tell me they’re not: they’re in event management. They tell me that P*pp*red Bl*ck, a local Indigenous security outfit are here, and that the community police and Aboriginal trackers have been brought in as part of crowd control.

While we’re chatting, some teenagers -- two Aboriginal girls and a white boy – start rumbling nearby. The boy is a young punky-type with a blond mullet. He gives one of the girls the finger, right in her face, and says, ‘You don’t understand English?’

The Centre Labour Force men tense, alert for pending hostility, but the moment passes and the teenagers career off.

I see a group of Aboriginal ladies standing near a troopie marked ‘Y8end&m@ Night Patrol’, and decide to approach them. They wear a uniform consisting of a long blue T-shirt over a long black skirt and assorted sandshoes – old Volleys and the black happy-shoes community women sometimes wear.

Jessie, a woman with slightly wild bobbed hair, says that they would be happy to speak to me. Of all the people I spoke with, she seems the most eager to be interviewed. There was even a sense that she’s a seasoned interviewee or spokesperson, which might not be unlikely, if she’s the front person with the media, government bodies, etc, for the Night Patrol.

She ushers me over to sit on the edge of an old well that’s been concreted in. A couple of kids crawl over the remaining joists above our heads while we talk. Three other ladies follow, and stand at a slight distance from us. Jessie explains that they’re keeping an eye on their vehicle, as someone went through their bags earlier in the evening and cleared out their wallets. She introduces me to two of the other ladies – Maisie and Nellie. They complain that it’s getting cold; it is an unexpectedly cool desert night for February. One of them wears a Magpies beanie, and another produces a blanket from the troopie and wraps it round her shoulders as we talk.

the match

Once a year, two national-level AFL* teams play a game in Alice. This year, competition two heavy-weights – Carlton, from Melbourne, and the West Coast Eagles, from Perth, are playing. It’s rumoured that the big teams play soft when they’re here, conserving their energies for the big city crowds. But still, it’s exciting that they would even come to Alice. It’s a major social occasion; everyone goes. You don’t have to be interested in sport or to follow the AFL.

At about five o’clock, I go down to the local pool for a swim. Even though the game proper isn’t meant to start for another couple of hours, there are people pouring into Traeger Park Oval, opposite the pool. A police road-block has been set up at the end of the street. I have to park in the bowling alley car park across the road, and walk up to the pool in my rashie, scungies and sarong (Americans: that’s anti-ultraviolet radiation T-shirt, bikini bottoms and sarong), feeling conspicuous. The atmosphere is keen round the oval. There are people in their best shorts and shirts, a lot of whom look to be from out of town. Many of them are young families with children. A group of young Aboriginal people help a friend in a wheelchair out of a car.

As I’m getting ready to leave after my swim, I catch the seven o’clock news bulletin on the radio. Apparently, 300 litres of alcohol have already been tipped out by police, 95 people have been taken into protective custody, and 250 people have been ‘moved on’, as part of a euphemistically-named anti-social behaviour strategy. Sporting matches in town are notorious catalysts for violence and substance abuse, so various policing strategies and alcohol restrictions have been trialled over time.

A little later, I join the press of bodies at the gate on Traeger Street. There’s increased security on the gates – that is, more than I’ve seen in the past. Aboriginal Community Police Officers ring the gate and run metal detectors up and down each person’s limbs on entry, presumably searching for weapons or maybe smuggled beer cans. Some people are ushered to one side for a random bag check. I doubt it has anything to do with the age of terror, and more to do with concerns about anti-social behaviour.

A film like Alice

And now for an intermission from some of our more earnest posting...

I went into Blockbuster today and found a video of A Town Like Alice, the original Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch version. I've never seen this one; only the Bryan Brown/Nicola Paget mini-series. Anyway, I approached the checkout with some embarrassment. I always feel I borrow such an odd array of things, I'm tempted to blurt out 'I'm a Creative Writing Lecturer' as I advance.

The callow youth behind the counter swiped it without a pucker.

'D'you wanna rent this for $3.00 or buy it for $2.95?' he asked.

'What?' I said.  I couldn't believe my luck.  The DVD of the same is on sale at the newsagency for $30, which seems way too expy.  'I'll buy it of course.' And save five cents in the process.

'We've been trying to get rid of it for ages,' the callow youth said.  'If it's a dud, you can always bring it back.'

How sad is that?   No one in Alice wants to watch see the original A Town Like Alice.  So much so, that Blockbuster will even refund the ex-rental if you don't like it.

markets

Markets are being held in the Mall abutting the Town Council lawns to celebrate Chinese New Year.  I’m not sure that these markets are any different to those usually held on the first Sunday of each month.  If anything, the stalls seem a little depleted in numbers; the full complement of sellers and buyers are probably still yet to return to town after the summer break.  The standard fare is on sale -- jewellery, old books, handicrafts, bags, clothing.  The Ba’hais and the environmentalists have their stalls out.  The Aboriginal hawkers are sitting in clusters on the Uniting Church Hall lawns, with paintings fanned around them.  Each group sells unframed canvases according to a particular style, in acrylic paints.

I draw back and sit on the low stone wall in front of the uniting church, eating a fruit sorbet.  Tourists and family groups sit in the shade on the lawns, eating and talking.  There’s no intermingling between black and white, except for a curious little white girl who starts tumbling in the grass with some Aboriginal girls her age.

dry town

On Sunday morning I ride along the river into town, intending to go to the Chinese New Year markets in the mall. There are new-ish signs along the river saying ‘No Drinking’ and ‘No Camping’, an offshoot of the Dry Town policy that has accompanied the Intervention. Nevertheless, there have been complaints that even though these restrictions have been made, there are still pockets of people drinking in the river. The town camps have also been made dry, which means that people sometimes sit across the road from a town camp near my place, drinking beer. A recent local newspaper article about enforcement of the Dry Town legislation (‘Dry town a farce’) says that Town Council rangers are not permitted to conduct ‘river runs’ enforcing camping and anti-litter by-laws without being accompanied by the police because of the ‘extreme danger in which they would be put’. I’m not sure whether this is a beat-up, but I’m in two minds about whether or not I should keep an eye out for clusters of women to speak to along the river; women at least should be safe to socialise with.

However, there’s no one camping in the river -- a decided change from previous years, when the river and neighbouring areas were overflowing with people from out of town, said to be escaping from the Port Augusta restrictions -- not even a huddle having a late breakfast round a fire on the far bank. Where these people have gone -- it seems inevitable that they will continue to drink somewhere -- I don’t know but the intention of the legislation is that it will be somewhere out of sight of the townsfolk and tourists, or perhaps that they will return to their communities. I’m also struck by the way that none of the reportage on this issue includes canvassing Aboriginal people’s views -- there’s police, an outraged white cyclist, and Councillors, but no one from local Aboriginal organisations (although T*ng*nty*r* was approached but unavailable for comment), let alone the people who use the river as accommodation.

Rounding the corner near the Town Hall, I see a small cluster of ladies sitting in the shade. The Town Council lawns have always been a popular place for community people to gather. When I first came to Alice, the lawns were an arid dustbowl, but the Town Hall has since been re-developed and landscaped. The buildings have been painted several shades of pastel orange (a popular palette, intended to merge with the desert colours) and made-over with a slightly middle-Eastern façade to blend with the palm trees left behind by the Afghan Traders. The lawns themselves are certainly more verdant and spongy than they were several years ago. It’s altogether a more pleasant space in which to pass the time.

across the road

I'm running a bit dry with blog material at the moment so what I thought I'd do is publish some conversations I've had with Aboriginal people.  Apropos comments made on an earlier post about the fact that black and white people don't speak to each other in the town where I live, I thought I'd conduct an social experiment to see how easy it is to talk to Aboriginal people.  The answer is: fairly easy, though in my case I struggled for conversational topics.

These stories are sketchy, they're not particularly illuminating: they don't answer why the two populations don't talk to each other in this town.  They're also not publication standard and they're not intended to provide social analysis either.

Across the Road

Across the road from where I work, there is a strip of scrubby land that runs along the railway track.  Almost directly opposite our gates is a gum known to our institution as the 'drinking tree', because a population of drinkers regularly congregate at its base.  One day, I decided to cross the road and see exactly who was there.

Three women are sitting on a shopping trolley lying on its side under the drinking tree, facing the railway line. An old man sits cross-legged in the dirt a couple of metres away from them. As I wheel along the strip of saltbushes and dirt that borders the railway line, wondering how I will make contact with them, one of the ladies runs out towards me. She’s a smallish woman wearing a long pink shirt with an almost matching bandanna over a long patterned cheesecloth skirt. She’s perky-featured, with full slightly crooked lips that look as though they’ve been recast by an old injury.

‘Sistergirl, hey sister girl!’ she cries, then drops her voice to a harsh whisper as if she wants to discuss a confidential matter, ‘You got five dollars? I’m hungry.’

She points to her mouth.

‘No,’ I say, ‘But I’ve got bananas.’

I open my canvas shoulder bag and show her the bananas. Fortunately, my wallet is obscured. I ask if anyone else would like a banana and hand them around. There’s just enough for everyone.

The woman in the bandanna is undaunted.

‘Two dollars,’ she insists.

She must know I’m shamming. Whitefellas, especially ones who carry bags and drive cars around, must have money on them.

‘This is your home?’ I say uncertainly, indicating the general area beneath the tree.

They ignore me and sit stolidly staring towards railway line, fanned by the afternoon breeze. The woman closest to me, in the middle of the group, looks the most authoritative or perhaps the most comfortable with a European. She has a short, rather nondescript middle-aged-type hair cut. Like the others, she wears a long baggy shirt over a patterned skirt. A small bright blue bag made from a synthetic material, a bit like a camera bag, hangs on a cord round her neck. She rests a green VB can on her knee. She doesn’t appear to be drunk. The woman in the bandanna perches on the trolley behind her, still peering hopefully over her right shoulder. The other woman sits on her left almost at a right-angle, not making eye contact with me at all. She looks more unkempt, less well-cared-for than the others. Her hair is roughly cut, her face is traced with deep lines or perhaps old scars. There’s a purple-crepe-bandaged cast like a boot on one of her wishbone-thin legs.