Unconfirmed Reports

I woke up at first light, unrained-upon and ready for action. I packed up, made a quick cup of tea, then headed back out to the road. Things were still pretty quiet, but this time I did get a lift, with some government electrical contractors in many-wheeled trucks that looked like they could drive over anything.

I was finally going to Wadeye.

The driver of my truck was called Brett, and he was friendly enough, but didn’t say much. Continue Reading »

Dear Concerned Taxpayer,

I have noticed that you are writing letters to every major newspaper in the country every week, and I note your concern regarding the cost of social services for Aboriginal people. I understand you feel that, as a taxpayer, you are being “ripped-off” when your tax dollars are spent on those ungrateful natives.

However, please let me give you a short lesson in economics.

Australia is a very rich country; in fact, we are now one of the richest in the world, on a per-capita basis. We are riding high on the biggest economic boom in our history.

Our economic boom is almost entirely based on mineral extraction, and much of the most profitable mining is done on Aboriginal land. In fact, Australia is earning billions every year from mining the Aboriginal lands.

Do you really think you are getting a bad deal, when a small proportion of the mining bounty is spent on social services for the Aboriginal communities whose land is being mined?

No, it’s not such a bad deal, is it? So please stop writing your mean-minded letters.

Sincerely -

In the Djapu language or Arnhem Land, the word for tea is “gopi”, though it hasn’t always been. In the early or mid-twentieth century, both tea and coffee would have first been introduced via contact with white Australians. It was natural then that Djapu should adopt words for these from English; however, Australian languages have quite different sound systems to English, so the words were transformed in the process.

Djapu will never start a word with harsh, dry sounds like “t” and “k”, which are made without vibration in the vocal cords. Continue Reading »

For some reason, I thought they would be connected up in Coober Pedy. Ha! Wireless internet? My phone doesn’t even work here.

I’m in the pub, drinking a beer. But I’m not here because I wanted a beer - that’s just incidental. I’m here because inside the pub is the only shady place in town, and out there it’s 35 degrees, I guess 45 degrees in the sun.

There are only men in the pub: sweary men, with elaborate tatoos. Continue Reading »

The first thing I noticed was the sun. Me and Oriana arrived in “winter” - that’s what they call August down in these parts - though it immediately challenges notions of European seasonality. We found ourselves sitting on our suitcases in the sun, on a railway platform, somewhat jetlagged, Sydney Central Station, about 11 o’clock in the morning. We had an hour to wait for a train to my sister’s house in the mountains: welcome to Australian public transport.

But it was quite peaceful waiting there, not quite awake but not at all sleepy. The air had a fresh, dry quality quite different to the UK - I think the air is always one of the first things that hits me when I land in Australia.

This place called itself the “Central” railway station, but there didn’t seem to be many people around. There was such a long time to wait until the next train, I went to search out coffee, and started to ask the man at the turnstiles if he would let me pass through for this purpose; but he just waved me on, without really listening to what I said. I have since noticed this to be a pattern of the Sydney metropolitan railways: you could perhaps get away without buying any tickets at all, because the soporific turnstile attendants always wave you through as soon as you threaten to talk to them.

There’s no friction on the turnstiles. But no traction, either.

We spent the first three weeks staying at houses of friends or relatives. This was easier than I’d expected - there seemed to be plenty of room everywhere. No worries mate: Sydney is a city where people have spare rooms. Then we found a place for ourselves, unexpectedly located in Castlecrag, an exclusive little bay on the North Shore. This wasn’t where we wanted to live: we wanted to be near the university, on the south side of the harbour, where all the normal people live. But every place we looked at was either horrible, or horribly over-subscribed with applicants; and then, ironically, we found a cheap place to live in a super-expensive suburb on the north side.

We are renting a three-room annex that is semi-attached to a beautiful 1930s house, designed by the architect Walter Burley Griffin. He is well known in Australia, because he more famously designed Canberra as our national capital 20 years before his work at Castlecrag.

Our door gives out direcly onto a garden, with large, tropical leaves everywhere. There are parrots screeching in the morning, and frogs croaking at night. A blue-tongued lizard suns himself on our doorstep, bush-turkeys wander down the path, and we have been warned that funnel-web spiders sometimes come in from the garden in summer.

The rainforest is limited though, once you go beyond our garden. There are only thin fringes of forest left around the water’s edge: everywhere else is saturated with new developments, each house more enormous than the last, all jostling for a peek at the bay. And you need a lot of garage space for all those cars.

My life now mostly involves sitting at the window looking out on the garden, and reading books. My PhD scholarship means that I am essentially being paid to read books, at least for the moment. The pay is not much - especially living in a place like Sydney - but it is a very benign job. Life is very tranquil, sitting at this window.

It’s a long way to anywhere from Castlecrag. Our little bay is just a few kilometres north of the main harbour, but without a car (or a private boat), we are miles away. Most weekdays I ride my bike to the trainline further inland, then catch a train across the Harbour Bridge and down to Sydney University, and stay there for half the day. This allows me to read in a different place for a while. In fact I read on the train, then get to uni and read in the library, then go back on the train reading, and get home and read some more there. Variety is the spice of life.

I also make ventures exploring Sydney, but I can’t quite find it. I can’t find its heart, or even its underbelly. So far I can only find surfaces, glimmers of light reflecting off the water.

There is quite limited eye-contact between strangers here - almost like London - and in general most people seem self-contained, pragmatic. All affluent and no effluent, one might say. And this bothers me, because I know it must be there, somewhere. All systems of production discharge some kind of waste; but in the global economy, Australia is still a grinning salesman, exclaiming, “Recesssion? What recession?”

There’s a place called “Villawood” somewhere out on the western fringes of Sydney, far inland, far from the water views. I’ve heard about Villawood recently, because this is the detention centre where they lock up the people who are not allowed in to Sydney - people who have been refused entry to the unending bonanza. Depending on your political persuasion, you might call them refugees, asylum-seekers, or illegal immigrants. If you’re all the way to the right, you will probably call them “queue-jumpers”, pretending that there is some sort of orderly queuing system available to people who need to escape violence in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka or Iraq.

I heard even more about Villawood this week, after a Fijian detainee threw himself off the roof, to his death. They had tried appealing to Australian justice and compassion, they had tried hunger-strikes, and I guess that was the only form of protest left.

So maybe Villawood is the underbelly, safely locked away in a place where real estate has no value. Maybe that’s where I need to go, to stand with the small groups of Australians who wait outside the fence, just in view of the hunger-striking detainees who are up on the roof of the prison.