I never know how to start a new post, I come up with a topic, the meat of the dish so to speak and I have a few interesting side dishes and other morsels I've scrounged as well, but how to present it so it looks digestible and appetizing,
When the meat in your dish ..to continue the metaphor ..involves aboriginal Australians there is always the possibility that the dish is going to look unpalatable before a bite is taken ...So I'm just going to throw this dish together as it came to me, it is what it is, ....swallow or choke...
It starts with a conversation with a regular customer.. I'll call him Bill, Bills' personality is a mixture of racism, Protectionism, Irish Catholic family values and right wing Liberal politics. He and I rarely see eye to eye... but the banter is always well behaved and kept reasonably civil. For all his disturbing traits he is still a nice man, a devoted father and husband.
Bill is an early customer so when he arrives to get something off his chest it often sets the theme for the rest of the day... and to-day, the starting topic was " One law for all ". Its one of the few topics we agree on with only the fine print being in dispute. For me the fine print deals with the indigenous Australian tribal courts. I have always thought that some flexibility is needed when dealing with the first Australians. Something I wouldn't necessarily extend to later guests. While I feel we have a right to impose the,
my house my rules to anyone coming into the house from the outside, its not possible to say that to the person who owned the house before you and still lives there ...
Later in the day the next customer that touched on the subject was a Uruguayan Australian married to a British Australian, who had never been to the bush!...and he has lived here for 30 years!! I'm sorry, but its a shame to come and never want to leave the city .. He knew nothing at all about Australian Aborigines. During our conversation I asked if he could name any American Indian tribes. Together we came up with ..The Sioux, the Apache, the Comanche , the Navajo, the Cheyenne and I think there is one called the Blackfeet, but don't quote me on that . Then I asked how many Aboriginal clans he could name. Not one! He didn't even know there were clans or different languages, I could only come up with three. The Koori,( NSW) the Anangu,(SA) and the Murri (QLD) this is pitiful!! Most average Australians today or ever, for that matter can give you a reasonable translation of a number of Spanish or French words but not one Aboriginal word that is not named as a town or street, even then the word is known but not the meaning ...
Later in the Afternoon a friend dropped by for a chat and a hot mocca ..Our bitch for the afternoon was the lack of content and the reruns on TV and Foxtell. Foxtell has so many reruns I could turn down the volume and quote the scripts on most of them. I'm also so over cop shows, lawyers and hospitals as if they are the only jobs that are going to supply enough fodder for a serial. After work while I wait to go to the pool, I troll a few torrent sites to see what is out there, that we are not offered on the box. I read the synopsis of at least fifteen shows that I have not seen or even heard of .. A few looked interesting so I downloaded the pilots to have a look ..
The two that got this post moving was " Little Mosque On The Prairie" and "Off The Map" the first takes a badly made, poorly acted comedic look at the differences between a small group of Muslims living in a small country town in Canada and the locals who know nothing about them. If it wasn't for their low budget they could of had a hit, the ingredients were there they just didn't cook it right. The other is an adventure medical show set in the South American jungle ( but shot in Hawaii with a drop dead gorgeous looking leading man from New Zealand ) the dialog in the show is peppered with Spanish words with no attempt made to translate. nothing is lost because of this , you just get to learn more Spanish words ..The show is 'Grays Anatomy' in the jungle..
I sat back after watching these shows and the gears and clogs in my brain slowly started to turn. I said to myself, ..be honest, how many Australian Aboriginals have I met and I'm a 6th or 7th generation Australian and I've lived in the bush ( when I was young)..I can't judge someone who arrived here 30 years ago, I been here longer than that ..so lets see ..
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| Condoblin |
When I was 14 my parents had been divorced for a few years and my mother was in a relationship with a share farmer named Joe ..We were bundled up and shipped to a new life in Condoblin ( not the best choice of phrase as there isn't much water in Condoblin). The Farm Joe was share farming was quite a way out of town and I remember my mother couldn't get any thing to grow it was so dry ..In Gunnedah we had a veggie garden and fruit trees and we missed them. On one hot summer morning a young Aboriginal stock man that worked on the farm told me about some wild watermelons that were ripening in the bush, and would I come with him to collect one ( I did know his name but now can't remember it ) A hot summers day in dry Condoblin ..no air conditioners on the farm and a forty in the shade!!... Of course I'm coming are you mad!. We rode for about half an hour into the scrub, me hanging on and bouncing around on the back, I never was a good rider.. I remember I had short shorts on and I could feel the sweat of the horse against my legs making it hotter. True to his word there they were. They had grown in the contours of a water course ( if in the event there was water to flow ) We went around taping each one to find the ripest ..We only had a choice of about 6 melons at that time but wanted the best and I could only carry one..We were ambitious and chose the largest one. We got back on the horse and headed for home with the melon between us. There were no stirrups or saddle on the horse so I had nothing to brace my weight against, my friend was used to riding this way but I was not and I couldn't hold on as tightly as I did before on the ride there so the melon and I were bouncing around on the rump of this poor horse and the inevitable happened. The watermelon slipped from my sweaty fingers and splatted on the ground, I remember we laughed and laughed at the mess but we were not going to let it go to waste so sat on a small outcrop of rocks and finished off the broken melon ..We did go back for more melons during the summer but he and my brothers had more success than the original trip .. The strongest memory I have of him is his easy laughter and big grin
The didgeridoo ..When in Gunnedah, across the flats from where I lived as a child was a camp or settlement of Aboriginal Australians. Late in the afternoon you could hear the echoing sounds of the didgeridoo. I have always loved that sound and when I lived in Newtown, an inercity suburb of Sydney I would often be late coming home from work and I would get off at Redfern station and walk home from there. I would hear and see the lone player siting on the end of a deserted platform in jeans and hoodie playing his tunes, I would wave and sit and listen for a while but we never met...
In the 80s, it was the thing to do. 'est' ..I think it was called, something like that, you sat in a large hall with a lot of other people and "shared" your inner thoughts and fears. (having paid $400 for the privilege) People who had done it thought every one should do it, and this is why I'm sitting in a large room with about 500 other people "Sharing!".. Sitting next to me is a red haired freckled aboriginal man of about 20-23 years, who felt he had been conned by a friend to do this ..Andrew was a Western Australian and we somehow hit it off. His dry humour made the two full weekends and two Tuesday nights fun ..Andrew didn't quite see things as other mixed up, paranoid, full of themselves, often self damaged spoilt people did and he had no trouble telling them so in a way that had no guile or malice..We were friends of sorts for many years ..I think I was like the mother or older sister he missed back home so he would come for advice on things from girls to clothes to condoms .. One of my favorite memories of Andrew was him turning up at my shop on his Harley Davidson motor bike. He rode it right up to the door blocking part of it. He was wearing his 'colours' from the bike club he belonged to. It was a Thursday evening and the shop was full ..I was mad at him for the noise they make and the fact he was nearly in the shop so I yelled at him to move the piece of s..t out of the way.. He put on this dog-eared look of mock hurt while my customers held their breath in horror as this leather clad biker told me he had just come to show me his new bike and please come and look..he went back to Western Australia and I haven't heard of him for over a decade
My only other close contact with an Australian Aboriginal was helping a woman choose her wedding dress. Both her and her partner were into medieval reenactment and wanted to have a medieval wedding, as my readers know by now I run a fancy dress costume shop and I get all sorts of requests, this is a simple one. Until she told me her whole female family were coming from Narrabri for a viewing. I had to arrange theatre seating outside the change rooms so the family, including the matriarch of the clan could see and have input into the dress .. Her partner and future husband was a German lad that worked in IT, and was big into
second life ..I can't help thinking there has to be some comedic value seeing the in laws meet.
Now I've got to pull this dish together
All these snippets came together as an idea for a TV serial ..The only way to get the average Joe blow or blow in, to know about life in the bush and the original Australians is to bring it and them into the mainstream. Onto prime time TV and into every lounge room, to discover about the different clans, the difference in customs and languages and set it against the rest of us ..a bit of comedy with a bit of drama ..
My synopsis for the show would read something like this ..
A group of young mixed (meaning both boys and girls) aboriginal and white Australian bush tour guides take tourists, travelers, backpackers into the wild and untamed land ..the juxta position of different cultures sexes and ages meeting for often the first time out back Australia, and its many characters, along with all the things that could go wrong when you don't know the bush ..its not like we don't have a lot to be weary of, and the struggle of young and old aboriginal ways along with young and old ways in general. It would do a few things, it would, could bring some Australian comedy and light drama to Australian television ..it would bring today's aboriginal culture into the mainstream. Instead of saying
ciao or
hasta la vista babe! we may have the young saying something closer to home. The ingredients are there we just need a good cook ..and don't we have a lot of those? ...
We give a lot of air time to new arrivals who find it difficult to jump with both feet onto Australia and a lot of resources are given to building bridges for people who still have a foot on the leakey boat they came from. ..Australia could be their life raft if only they would commit to the jump ..until they do lets give less airtime to the squeaky wheels, roll up our swags, fill up our canteens and go walkabout.....
