We kicked the day off by going downtown and strolling around the Yeperenye shopping centre for a while. Ran into Kukula McDonald there. (Aboriginal artist of high degree. See Wednesday blog.)
Then strolled over and walked around the mall for a while before settling into an outdoor cafe. Bruce McDonald who used to work out at Docker River came by and we yarned for a bit. Kukula went past arm in arm with another Aboriginal woman. Then along came an Aboriginal couple I knew well from Imanpa community - Michael Bulla and his wife Nellie Mick. Nellie showed us two quite good paintings but we said sorry, we're not buying. Then Michael, whose nickname for some reason is Gooma, naturally put the bite on, but I explained that I'm an ole pensioner these days, I got no money.
Gooma was an expert scam artist when I knew him fifteen years ago, probably still is. He would drive a battered old car filled with his wife and kids down to a shady spot on the Luritcha Highway (road to Ayers Rock), put the bonnet up and pretend he had broken down. It was hard for passing tourists to resist the sight of the family sitting forlornly by the side of the road. He used to make quite a good living. Whenever I saw them though, I would make a rude gesture and Gooma would reply with a similar one.
They wandered off. Kukula went past in the other direction, arm in arm with a white woman. We wandered off too, in the warm air, back home to the Davis'. Around lunchtime Bill and Ann's son Rory arrived. He'd just returned from a week's working on vehicle maintenance for the NPY Women's Council out at Wingellina. Waaay out west. With Rory were his wife Miru (from the Maldives) and beautiful little son Ruben.
Merri reading to Ruben. Ann shooting past in the background
In the afternoon I went over to my mate Dave Oake's place to help him again with the carton of Guinness and load up some new Q-Base sound recording software on his computer. This did not go well and after four tries we had to give it away. There was something corrupt with a downloaded file. I suggested to Oakes that he'd better get help from a ten year old kid. They're good at these things.
Bill cooked up a magnificent stir-fry and after dinner we went to the Cat's Meow Cabaret in the big top, a major part of the Alice Desert Festival. Very hard to describe adequately. A mix of really outrageous acts, quite rude, some good music, some comedy not so good. It was very Alice Springs cabaret, with a big crowd mostly enjoying it, but it needed to be Berlinned up somehow. A bit more high pressure razzamatazz or something.
Night night.
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