Wednesday September 18 2013

The final blog. We're flying home today after once again a wonderful holiday with friends and country. The heartland.

Yesterday morning we drove out again to Simpson's Gap, along the Hermansburg Road, not far out of town. According to the signage and story-board at the ranger station, there is some confusion about who Simpson actually was, but his gap is a striking feature of the landscape.

We spent a short time in the creekbed, enjoying the ancient river-gums and vistas but the flies were really annoying. A friend told us that the winter this year had not been very cold and the flies had not died out as they normally did every winter.

This rock wallaby near the ranger station is actually made of rock. It's a carving.

We drove slowly around Ilparpa Road, past Honeymoon Gap where in past years we celebrated the wedding of Bill and Ann's daughter Nyree and, where fifteen years ago we mourned the untimely death of my Nyangatjatjara boss Laurie Gorman.

We drove the Desert Knowledge Centre, where Ann works, for lunch in the canteen with Ann and Meredith Campbell. An old friend, John Oster joined us and it was good to see him. John is currently working on getting proper recognition, accreditation and pay for Aboriginal artists and workers in the Aboriginal arts industry. Before that he was CEO at Desart, an Alice Springs based umbrella organisation for Aboriginal art centres. Before that he ran the art centre at Balgo for about ten years. Before that, twenty years ago he was the presenter on the children's TV show 'Fat Cat and Friends' and I was the clown o the show!

Me, MC, John Oster, Ann

Next stop was the supermarket to buy some supplies for tea. Merri made her celebrated Thai Chicken dish.

Bill turned up unexpectedly. He'd left on Monday morning to drive to Umuwa and work there for the week, but he's been diagnosed with a hernia and it was playing up and he didn't feel to flash, so decided yesterday at mid-day to return to town. Just 400 k's or so. Nothing, really.

In the evening Merri went with Ann to see a dance show at Araluen and I went to help Oakes with some more computer software and hardware and the carton of Guinness, so we both had a pleasant last night in Alice, in different ways. Meredith came home excited and elated about the dance show, titled 'Alice Can Dance' and featuring about 200 local kids. She said the standard was brilliant, and she should know,

Well well, that's about it.

Monday September 16 2013

A year or so ago Ann Davis came up with the idea of making a book about all the long-term residents of Giles Street. Bill and Ann live at number 49 and there are many other interesting people in the street who've been there for thirty years or more. Federal Polly Warren Snowdon is one of them.

Ann ran several residents' meetings, there was considerable interest and material in the form of individual stories from the different houses was written, collected, collated and edited.

However the idea of a book has morphed into the idea of a website, which the residents will be able to access and modify and Ann has commissioned me to produce the website, which will be a great delight.

I've been taking photos of the houses and here's a typical one...

So yesterday we started by visiting old friend Peter Yates, a few doors up the road in Giles Street. We'd not visited earlier because he and Pamela had been out bush, helping run a healing camp for distressed white people from down south, with the help of local Aboriginal people. This is the sort of thing Pete does. He has an amazing fruit and vegetable garden at his  house and has a company named VAST under the auspice of which he finds and casts Aboriginal actors for films. He worked with Rolf de Heer on 'Tracker' and more recently found actors for 'Tracks', the story of Robyn Davidson's amazing trek with camels from Alice Springs to the west coast in 1976. One man he cast was Roly Mintumi from Mutitjulu. to play old Mr. Eddie from Wingellina, who walked with Robyn for several hundred kilometres. in 1997 I hired Roly to be our first male house-parent at Nyangatjatjara College.

Peter Yates

Pete set up the art centre at Ramingining (David Gulpilil's home town in Arnhemland) thirty years ago and also Maruku Arts at Mutitjulu, whih still runs well, collecting and marketing bush wood carvings from communities all around the area. He's spent pretty much the whole of his adult life working for the betterment of Aboriginal people. And he's also very funny! Great bloke.

Next we went out to the Old Telegraph Station, a must-see for all tourists to Alice. It's a few kilometres up the north road from town, but was the original white  settlement here. It's on the bank of the Todd River, nestling in to beautiful rockscapes such as this ...

 Rocks on approach to Telegraph Station

The Allchurch referred to in this tourist info board was the uncle of Don Allchurch, who lived next to us at Willunga. The uncle was stationmaster at the telegraph station until it ceased operations in 1932.

There is much of interest to see and learn at the Telegraph Station but it is best to Google it.

The old stone buildings are in excellent condition

We went for a second time to the IAD cafe for lunch and then to the IAD bookshop where Merri bought a beautiful book about Aboriginal art - Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists - and I bought Yami Lester's autobiography, first published in 1993, but Yami's still going strong.

We found a cafe near where we're staying in Eastside, called the Pilates Cafe. Only been open for a month and they've renovated a big old shed where a friend Robin Laidlaw used to live until he unfortunately died five years ago.

More typical Alice Springs architecture.

Right across the road from the cafe is the Muk Muk Aboriginal art gallery. By cripes, have we seen some artwork on this trip. Muk Muk has works by many well known artists and the young lass in charge was very knowledgeable. So many styles, so many new themes emerging.

Don't know who painted this piece at Muk Muk

Dinner and yarns last night with friends Meredith Campbell and Richard. He sells St. John Ambulance first aid kits, she works as a carer for disabled Aboriginal people - some with autism, some brain-damaged. They have a boarder named Audra (not a mis-spelling) who works as cook at the Alice Hospital, who cooked the barbie last night and is unexpectedly very funny.

Audra told a yarn of coming home one night to find her dog with a mouth full of feathers because he'd chewed the whole centre strip out of a duckfeather doona and she reckoned he was thinking, 'Where's the effing duck?' She also showed us pictures of her eight month old grandson who has a huge set of well developed teeth and has been chewing up a lot of his cot. She thinks he's a monster. They call him the beaver.

Sunday September 15 2013

The days are passing too fast!

Yesterday Sunday market in the mall. It's a good market, a bit like markets everywhere with a few special Territory offerings.

Me in the mall market

Large numbers of Aboriginal artists have paintings for sale, spread out on the lawns by Flynn Church

Camel poo is one of the unusual items for sale. I don't think it is a very nutritious fertiliser because camels have four stomachs, their food passes through each one by one and by the time the poo comes out at the back of the camel all the goodness has been extracted. We didn't buy a bag.

The mall market from the other end

In the afternoon we went to a party at the house of Marg Bowman, distant cousin of Merediths, two doors down the road.

The celebrated singer and ex NT Administrator Ted Egan was there.

Suzanne Bryce,   on the right, was the first local I met in Alice Springs, on my first visit in 1976. She is still working for NPY Womens' Council, spends most of her time in bush communities, working for the betterment of Aboriginal people as she was when I first met her.

I spent some time talking to an interesting bloke of Italian descent, born in Melbourne, lived in Montmartre for twenty years, worked as a painter, knew dozens of famous people including Richard Burton whom, he said, he met three days before he died of a cocaine overdose. Maybe....

Friday September 14 2013

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.

13 September 2013

Big day yesterday! Lots to see and do.

At about 10 we walked up Giles St to see Peter and Pamela Yates, but as we neared the house we found Suzanne Bryce backing out in Pamela's car, which she was borrowing. She said the Yates were away 'til next week, She was the second Alice Springs local I met on my first trip up here in 1976. She's still working hard for Aboriginal people, for the NPY Women's Council, spends three quarters of her time out in bush communities.

Next we went to the Raft Gallery, where there is a fine collection of paintings from artists in the Western Desert - Docker River, Tjukurla etc. Quite a few of them had been worked on by more than one person, an increasingly common occurrence these days.

Next stop - the Edible Garden Centre, two doors down. This is a nursery and also a cafe, with nooks and crannies all over the place, a piano area, a poetry corner, Very inspired outback setting, very Alice Spriings. I commented to the owner that it was beaut and she replied that it was for sale and we could buy it if we were short of something to do. Part of the reason is that there is now a vast Bunnings store in town and the nursery business is going down the pan.

Edible Garden Centre

With some time to go before we met with Meredith Campbell (henceforth MC) for lunch we made the traditional pilgrimage up Anzac Hill. You have to go up Anzac Hill at least once on every trip to Alice. The 360 degree panorama from the top is astounding, with the town nestling in the valley and ringed on all sides by mountains.

Mount Gillen from Anzac Hill

I've lost count of the number of photos of Mount Gillen I've taken from Anzac Hill, let alone the views in other directions.

So then we went to Rendezvous with MC and lunch at the IAD cafe. (Institute for Aboriginal Development.) It is another excellent establishment.  As neither Meredith nor I were greatly hungry we decided on a sandwich. One that looked interesting had a sign saying 'Stir Fry Chicken' so we asked the chap behind the counter for that. He said 'What?' We pointed to it. He said 'No, that's satay chicken sandwich'. Turns out he employs a young Korean girl whose English is less than perfect and she had written the sign.

From lunch we went down to the Big Top to see the circus, part of the Festival. A good crowd there, of many nationalities and in particular lots of Aboriginal kids, The show was about an hour long, featuring a good representation of kids, from quite young to late teen-age performing circus routines of very good standard and clown comedy of a lesser standard. The highlight was a group of Aboriginal boys from Mutijulu community, down by Ayers Rock, doing a mix of tumbling, juggling and diabolo work. Having left my job at Yulara nearly nine years ago I didn't know any of the young boys, but did know Neil, who went to our school, Nyangatjatjara College, that I built. He was there as a carer and had two boys in the show!

Artistic shot of the big top

The trapeze artists had an excellent standard

Once again, not a great photo. Grand finale and curtain call.

From the circus to the shop to buy certain ingredients, then home to Davis Hotel where I started preparing my new signature dish, Morroccan Osso Buco. It took quite a while and then had to cook slowly in the oven for several hours.

While it was cooking Punj dropped in. Another old friend of many decades' standing, still working for Aboriginal mob, spends a lot of time way out west in the bush communities, an engineer by training, was a windmill specialist, now working on waste and rubbish recycling. Great idea. Another example of life writ large in the Centre. And he is large too. I am six foot four in the old weight, but he towers above me.

The osso buco was very well received. After which we watched the footy, with Geelong beating Port Power in the semi final, rats and knickers because Port is my team, but anyway they did really well this year.

Every day I spend here I feel my energy returning and my desire to do stuff growing, and I'm being influenced by the country and old friends and the massive energy of the Centre.

And so it  goes.

And so to bed.

Thursday September 12

We kicked off yesterday by meeting for coffee with Meredith Campbell in one of our favourite Alice cafes, Page 27. It is in a laneway off the mall. It was called Bar Doppio for many years but is under new management and revitalised.

Meredith and Meredith. The bloke on the left behind Meredith 2 is Knies, one of the two blokes who found Ann's phone, referred to in the very first blog. He had just come from winning the 24 hour dance-a-thon. He didn't recognise us.

Meredith 2 was very enthusiastic that we should see the biggest ghost gum in the world (in her opinion), out behind the ranger station at Simpson's Gap. So after hiring a Thrifty car for a few days we headed out to the  Gap, found the ranger station and found this awesome and very beautiful tree.

Several hundred years old, very important to local people.

I know it sounds a bit wussy, but we didn't go on to Simpson's Gap and walk around because we had sandals on and you get little stones in them and it's REALLY irritating.

Instead we drove back into town and checked out another Aboriginal art gallery, Tangentyerre. More stunning paintings, this time all done by people living in the town camps around Alice. a selection of self portraits and a lot of pieces in a new naive style depicting stories of camping, journeys, sports events,

Next stop was Milner Meats, the best butcher shop in Alice, for some osso buco for Friday night, one of my new dishes. Morroccan Osso Buco. Whacko.

Half a dozen or so people arrived at Davis Hotel at about 6, to share a meal. I hadn't met any of them but one before but as is usually the way there they were all interesting and the conversation flowed without stop. The one we did know was Marg Bowman, who lives two doors down the road and is a distant cousin of Meredith's. She has been a dealer in Aboriginal art for many years, one of the good sort, not one of the carpet-bagger rip-off merchant exploiter types.

Wednesday September 11.

With  Ann's car at our disposal, she being away on a bush trip, we decided to go out to Ross River Station in the Eastern McDonnell ranges. Taking things easy, not rushing too much, we left at about 11. It's not far - only about 90 k from Alice - but on all the previous times I've tried to visit it has been closed, for a variety of reasons including fire.

You drive south for a while, then east along the base of the ranges, then after about twenty k you turn into the mountains as they rise up around you and the scenery suddenly changes gear from beautiful  to spectacular.

Not mad about this photo. Really doesn't do the scenery justice.

Well soon we were at the old homestead, built over a hundred years ago as a cattle station and it was enchanting to walk around inside and feel the history of the old rooms and furniture, and imagine the good times and bad, droughts, floods and bushfires that they'd known, bearing in mind how incredibly remote it is.

The old homestead

The big dining room, added in the fifties for tourists. In these outback oases one finds unusual mementoes, such as the skin of a huge feral cat, a kangaroo skeleton and so on.

We spent an hour or so there then acceded to a request from a woman named Sally for a lift back to Alice. Hers was an interesting story but I won't go into it here.

We stopped for a brief look at Emily Gap on the way back to Alice. Very special place for Aranda people.

Sally took our photo.

Annie got home in late afternoon, hot, dusty and tired. Her trip to Willuna to talk with the community about the new learning centre had not been a success because it was time for mining lease money to arrive and the various community factions were at each others' throats about who should get what and in no mind to talk calmly about a learning centre. There are good and bad things happening in Aboriginal communities all over Australia and this is an example of how they can conflict and of how much pressure people like Ann, working cross-culturally, have been under for years.

So Annie did not feel like coming downtown to see the street parade and the opening of the Alice Desert Festival, but after a simple but filling pasta and salad meal prepared by Meredith and me, we went off to participate. 

Todd Mall was filling fast when we got there at 5.30. We caught up with friends Meredith Campbell (a wedding celebrant) and her husband Richard and found a fine vantage point.

In the last couple of years my Meredith (Bowman) has bought two arresting paintings of black cockatoos by an increasingly well-known Centralian artist named Kukula McDonald. Kukula spotted Meredith Campbell in the crowd and here they are.

Meredith has been a carer for Kukula, who has a strange disability due to having had meningitis when she was young.

Inside a building right near the start of the street parade they were holding a 24 hour non-stop dance-a-thon.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Here follow some photos from the street parade, which wasn't very long but was very extra ordinary.

Hotpants and daughter led the parade

Bloody great big caterpillar makes its appearance

Inside the caterpillar was a drum band

A well-built but somewhat mystifying contraption being danced around by witches

Aboriginal Indian

Drum Atweme - the Aboriginal kids' drumming band that's been going for ten years, the brainchild of Peter Lowson, seen on the left, leading it, walking backwards.

Battye's bomb

Bringing up the rear of the parade was an incredible old bomb of a car, with smoke belching out and no muffler, being driven by David Battye, the maker of the Bush Mechanics series and with an Aboriginal guy on the roof filming the crowd, many of whom were running for their lives. It got ahead of us but when we got down to the ANZ bank there was a huge pool of dirty water on the road and the car stopped a few yards further on, with the bonnet up. About six black guys were peering into the engine and doing things. Battye said 'It blew up!' I believed him, but when they got it going again only for it to explode a few metres further on we realised that it was street theatre and advertising for Battye's event in the Mbantua Music Festival in October, which will involve Aboriginal mechanics fixing up broken cars, just like they did in Bush Mechanics. But it was bloody funny!

One of my impressions from the street parade was the great involvement of Aboriginal people, mainly kids, with no feelings of embarrassment, coercion or shame, rather pride and happiness.

And so back to Giles Street, to watch QI and Gruen to round off another great day.