A dog's life

It's taken just over three months for me to break my number one cardinal rule of living in an Aboriginal community: don't feed the dogs.
Because, as those who live here will tell you, feed one dog, and you'll end up feeding the lot, and the lot is, well, a lot.
Earlier this evening, I turn around to see my new friend, Bagobones (white, in centre), has now invited all her mates along for some good times at the kind-hearted white fella's camp. At one point, I counted 19 dogs, and, in true 'only-in-a-Aboriginal' community style, the pig from next door, all waiting patiently on the promise of free food.
For a dog person like myself, it's hard not to feel sorry for 'em. Despite being all shapes and sizes, and made up of hundreds of breeds mixed together, they share lots of similarities (like open sores, broken bones and flea infestations) and are eternally hungry.
Like everyone else here, the dogs are another community collective, and continually on the move from one house to another in search of shelter, company and food. Since Thursday, Bagobones has been getting all three from me - and hasn't been shy in letting the lot of four-legged mates know about it, either.

Out to the outstations

Now that the wild weather of the wet is over until October, many families here are heading to their outstations, remote bush camps located anywhere between 50 and 150 kilometres away from the community itself.
Offering a respite from the unpredictable turbulence of the community, outstations provide an opportunity for a more traditional approach to Aboriginal life through fishing, hunting, story telling, and maybe most importantly, an absence of alcohol.
As always up here, the difficulty is in the distance - to get to and from their outstation, the family needs either a working vehicle (and, generally, one with four-wheel drive) or a generous government employee willing to give them a ride.
Fortunately, they've got the latter, with an unspoken emphasis on 'willing'.
Unlike many other requests for rides, I'm always happy to take people to their outstation. It's one of the best parts of the job, and a great chance to see absolutely amazing parts of the country and connect with a culture in their own context.
Better still, with most of my outstations located in coastal areas, the rewards are more than just scenic, with fresh mud crabs, barramundi, red snapper and salmon usually provided in return for a ride.

The function of dysfunction

By all conventional measures, many remote Aboriginal communities are what we'd generally - and perhaps generously - term completely dysfunctional.
High levels of unemployment, substance abuse, violence and abject poverty make them depressing places for outsiders or those like myself who've been brought up with an understanding of western, (sub)urbanised ideals.
Yet, somehow, they manage to work. Food gets bought, kids get fed, battered wives are sheltered and bills are paid.
I suspect much of it has to do with the overwhelming strength of 'family', and the loyalties that go with it. Everyone is some sort of relative up here, which means you'll almost always be taken care of, whether that means a meal, money, a bed or booze. Time, distance and relationship level mean little - it doesn't matter if it's your brother from next door, or your third-cousin-twice-removed from a town 600 kilometres down the track who you haven't seen for 10 years, you'll take care of them when they land on your doorstep. If that means 20 people in a house built for four, so be it. If it means something as complex as raising someone else's kids or as simple as handing over your last smoke without so much as a please or thank you, so be it.
It leads to a culture that makes little recognition of individual ownership or personal possession, instead taking a collective approach to benefit the wider community.
The result? Function from dysfunction...just as long as you don't measure it conventionally.

A lighter shade of dust

Midnight Oil sung about it, and I'd be warned about it - the dreaded red dust of the north.
It gets over, under, in, out and through absolutely everything, including the double-sealed doors of my, ahem, 'desert rated' 4WD.
Obviously the novelty of being up north hasn't worn off, because I must be the only person who likes it. I'm happy sitting by the side of the road waiting for the dust to settle and visibility to return after a road-train passes in the opposite direction (current record: 13 minutes, 22 seconds) and there's a certain childish charm about seeing your once-bright-white vehicle turn a flat shade of rusty brown.
Sitting in the carpark of the Tennant Creek Hotel, I get the sense of an unspoken rivalry as to whose car carries the most dust; tangible proof of who's travelled the furthest, roughest or most remote.
Despite over 600kms of dirt tracks, and dust from one end to the other, my car doesn't even come close.

Challenging, confronting, confusing

As I pass the halfway mark of my deployment up here, I'm increasingly asked about what it's like to live in a remote Aboriginal community for an extended period of time.
For me, it's best described by the three C's: challenging, confronting, confusing.
The challenge comes from the isolation (geographic, social and cultural), the climate, and the sheer complexity of the many issues facing Aboriginal communities.
The confrontation comes from the alcohol, the violence and the abject state of poverty most people live in. My colleague Virginia, a senior manager who's worked in some of the world's toughest third-world countries, says she's never seen anything like what she has here.
The confusion comes from a community that recognises its own problems and the causes of them, but does little, if anything, to begin addressing them. The confusion is compounded by the opportunities and promise the community can see for itself, despite the challenges and confrontations above.
I suspect that much of the frustration I feel is not a result of what I see and hear, but of simply not knowing where to begin. Which issue to fix first, and what to do when fixing one issue creates another two, three or four?
Having seen the reality of Aboriginal communities in the past, I didn't come up here expecting to save the world, or even come close to it, but it's the first time in my professional career that I've felt well and truly lost, miles away from any possible answer - and that's a very, very difficult thing for an armchair expert like myself.

24/7 in service delivery

With yet another change to my deployment - making for an even 440km commute each day - I'm well behind schedule on status reports, weekly summaries, project updates, financial reconciliations and blog entries.
Unfortunately, the situation isn't made much better by the almost constant expectations placed on you by the community - whether it be for the Australian Government Conflict Resolution Service, the Australian Government Vehicle Recovery Service, the Australian Government Bush Lawyer Legal Aid Service or the Australian Government Electric Kettle Service.
So, in the meantime, no blog for today, but a happy pic of a happy kid during a recent excursion to Diamond Creek - organised, of course, by the Australian Government Childcare Service.

Slow times on the Stuart Highway

Only in the Territory would someone think to transport a demountable - blocking both lanes of the main road out of town - at three PM on a Friday afternoon. So slow was the traffic and so painful the process, I had time to take a picture, download it, write up some words and shoot it off to the NT News - all in the space of about 16 kilometres.

At least they're not doing things by halves
It may not be the longest load the Stuart Highway has seen – but it might well be the widest!
With a police escort and surrounded by a swarm of six support vehicles, this demountable house brought southbound traffic on the Stuart Highway to a crawl yesterday afternoon.
Starting the slow journey in Nightcliff, and destined for delivery in Katherine, the house took up both lanes of the highway, and came precariously close to hitting trees, traffic lights, road signs and street lights as it left the suburbs of Darwin.
The unusual sight saw drivers pulling over for a better look at how something so wide would make it across some of the not-so-wide sections ahead.
Virginia Perkins, who was on her way to Mandorah, said she couldn’t believe her eyes when she came around a corner to find a full-sized house slowing the traffic ahead.
“The highway gets pretty narrow in some places, so I hope they’ve got their measurements right,” she said.
However, the house was being transported on a special hydraulic trailer, allowing it to be raised up and over any obstacles which had been identified along the route, a spokesperson for the NT Government said.
The house was expected to arrive in Katherine yesterday evening.

Northern Territory News, Saturday 10 May 2008

When less is more in four by four

If you thought you needed the latest Landcruiser with all the whistles and bells to head bush, think again.
Despite the hundreds of kilometres of rough-as-guts bush tracks surrounding the community I'm living in here, there's only one person with a four-wheel drive, and as you can see, it's no late model Landcruiser.
Instead, it's a 41 year-old Nissan Patrol and, while indeed a four-wheel drive (or '4x4'), I often think the 4x4 refers to four completely different tyres, or four different panel colours, or four places that haven't rusted over.
Yet, despite the shabby, scrapyard-like appearance, I'll often find the Patrol, and its owner, Les, in places I'd never dream of taking my (bells and whistles equipped) 4x4. Whether a fast flowing river, or a road turned black with bog, Les manages to get the Patrol across - and, perhaps more importantly, back across - without a worry in the world.
More often than not, he'll do it with a full load, which in most Aboriginal communities, means at least 10 people (and fishing gear and crab pots and eskies and dogs and everything else) squeezing into a car built for five - although that's working on the principle of passengers sitting in the car, and not on it.

Firing up for the dry season

At long last, the dry arrives. The towering clouds of approaching thunderstorms are gone, and in their place, the black, acrid smoke of grass fires drifts slowly across an otherwise bare sky.
Deliberately lit, the fires play an important part in managing the environment here, getting rid of the 12 foot high spear grass that covers much of the Territory, and preventing a huge fuel load from building up year after year.
Yet despite their significance, there seems to be little structure or science as to where the fires will be lit, when and by who. On several trips out bush over the past week, I'm asked to pull over, not, as I first think, for passengers to take a pee break, but instead for someone to jump out, cigarette lighter in hand, and set fire to the grass.
Of course, it doesn't matter that we might actually be driving back on the same road or that the wind is blowing towards our destination...just as long as the grass is alight and the black smoke is rising, the job is done and we're on our way.

White fella dreaming in a black fella world

A recent email from a very good and much respected mate down south got me thinking about a term you hear pretty frequently up here, 'white fella dreaming'.
Basically, the term refers to the the commonly held conception by many white fellas that all Aboriginal people, and especially those in remote and isolated communities, are defined by some sort of amazing, intriguing and somewhat mystical makeup; that their days are filled with ceremonial and cultural practice, in between living off the land through bush tucker and spiritual beliefs.
The dreaming bit comes into play when those same white fellas see a community up close and personal, and discover that cultural practice is replaced by abject poverty, bush tucker is little more than chips and Coke, and spiritual beliefs come a distant second to the spirits more often found in a 750ml bottle.
There's no question that Aboriginal Australians still have a tremendous cultural connection with their land, and the myths, stories, and belief systems that go with it, but sadly, this is disappearing, particularly among the younger generation.
Take, for example, the 'Westside' crew of my community, all of whom waste no time in telling me just how expert bushmen they are, and how I, as a shoe-wearing, pink-skinned, city-slicker, wouldn't stand a chance out bush. I agree, jumping at the chance to see how it's really, truly done by expert bushmen such as these, and the challenge is set.
I tell the crew to meet me at 7am Sunday morning - we'll walk from the community to the coast and back, a 36km round trip. Each is free to choose their own route, and bring along whatever supplies they can fit in a small backpack.
So, come Sunday morning, I leave Darwin at 0500; with me, walking shoes, gaiters, 2L of water, a Powerbar, some instant noodles, matches and a knife.
When I arrive at 0700, the entire crew is asleep, and when woken, most are hungover. They insist on taking my 4WD rather than going by foot; stopping by the supermarket for a cask of water instead of sourcing from the many springs; and a 12-gauge shotgun replaces the Nula-Nula [a heavy wooden club].
Granted, the crew wins on the bush tucker front - shooting, skinning and cooking a wallaby - but fails on pretty much everything else, including remembering the matches for the fire. Lucky that pink-skinned city-slicker brought some along.
It's no big issue, and I suspect the icy-cold can of beer at the end of the day was equally deserved by everyone, but the episode is the first eye-opener to my own world of white fella dreaming in the new-day black fella world.