Wednesday 22 April, 2009
Katherine
Katherine is 300 km south of Darwin. There can be severe floods there in February/March - in 1998 and 2006 there was great devastation - and the folks at the NT Writers Centre sent me cheery emails along the lines of only once having had to helicopter an author out. But, while there was much talk of rain, and recently flooded roads, the town felt hot, bleak, and dry. Katherine is famous for the gorge which is, indeed, an extraordinary place. Now known by the aboriginal name Nitmiluk, it winds 12 km and its walls are more than 70m high. The gorges (there are 13 of them) were formed 23 million years ago, a fact it is a struggle to comprehend. The effect of spending time there is to fall silent - it's a profound landscape. Those of you who have seen the Australian film Jedda (made in 1955 and the first Australian film with Aboriginal stars) will recognise the ridge below as the location of the film's final scene.
To see the gorge in the wet season you need to do a cruise - swimming and kayaking can lead to being munched - and you do that through the Nitmiluk National Park which is run by the Jawoyn people. When I visited twenty years ago the cruise had been run by white locals and had been all about croc watching. This time round our Jawoyn guide was much more interested in explaining the history of the place. The freshwater crocs (smaller, less dangerous) were given wide berth so that we didn't disturb them.
That bit of travelogue is, in a way, beside the point. I was there not as a tourist but to run a workshop and to give a speech at the International Women's Day afternoon tea (I'd been listed on posters as a 'performer' which I found alarming). They sure can cook up that way, and the baking was exceptional - but the speeches were better again, with the first speaker talking about the history of women's rights and the importance of contraception to women's liberation. It was old school, unironic, and spot on. I spoke after the town's mayor, an impressive woman called Anne Shepherd. I can sometimes be an awkward public speaker but I had no trouble at all talking to this group of women about the importance of women tellling their own stories. And the stories of the women I met were extraordinary. I had my longest conversation with Toni Tapp Coutts a woman who'd grown up on a large station in the area and, so she told me, not heard of The Beatles until 1972. To make up for her slow start in pop culture she'd gone to embrace it with some enthusiasm, and was, the day I met her, dressed in lame in honour of the Sydney Mardi Gras, which had been held the day before.
Toni was one of five people I ran a workshop for the next evening. The group were very tight and have been editing and workshopping each other's work for some time. Erotica, travel, crime - these writers were willing to give anything a shot - but the emphasis was on autobiographical writing because these writers realized - correctly - that they had gleaned experiences from living in such a remote community (though only Toni had been born in the area) that were striking.
No indigenous people joined the workshop and in general I got the sense that the black and white communities lived their lives separately. While all the whites I met were respectful of the indigenous people there was also an awkward sense of competition. That is, the white people I met felt very connected to the landscape but felt that their connections to the place were lost amid focus on indigenous connection to the land, and land rights. There was a lot of talk about white people's right to assert a relationship to the land. While people like Toni were aware they had got that sense of connection, in part, by growing up among indigenous people who told the land's story there was enough friction (well that was my perception) to mean that there was to be no sharing of black/white stories at a writing workshop. The situation was totally different down at Tennant Creek, where I taught a couple of days later: there indigenous women travelled 300 kms to attend a workshop of 15 or so people. More on which, another day.
PermalinkWednesday 22 April, 2009
The Great Northern Territory Adventure
Last month I went to the Northern Territory for 12 days to teach a series of writing workshops for the Northern Territory Writers Centre. It's always hard to know what people get out of these things but personally, I've never got more out of a short period of travel or teaching. And that wasn't just because of the adrenalin rush of passing road trains at 130 kilometres per hour - though there is no doubt that was pretty darn exciting.
I arrived in Darwin about midnight on Friday March 6. The heat was dense and wet. It was hard to believe I was still in Australia - and all that tropical greenery was very shocking to Melbourne eyes. Darwin is wild town - though not, by all accounts, as wild as it was pre-Cyclone. Almost all the white people there have chosen to go up for one lifestyle reason or another and their career paths were serpentine. One of the first things that struck me was how people didn't live their lives in as abstracted a fashion as I feel we do in Melbourne. Everyone (well, you know, almost everyone) was working in indigenous communities, or making art or taking up some kind of extreme sport. People seemed to throw themselves into life at the deep end and hope they ended up swimming.
I taught a Travel Workshop at nine the next morning in the parliament house library. Was struck by how many stories involved details stories of the perils of tires blowing and then being stuck, literally, hundreds of miles from nowhere. One guy wrote about the fact that now that petrol stations are all chains like BP, rather than local businesses, they no longer keep tires. Instead you have to call a tire company that drives a tire out to you at exorbitant expense. Economic irrationalism at work.There was lots of talk of bulldust, that fine dust that lifts, like a mini dust storm, obscuring all vision - I'd never known where that saying had come from before.
I was struck by the fact that the travels written about were local (well, if you can describe as traveling thousands of k's across the Top End as local) and the focus was on landscape and place. More anecdotally alot of the people I spoke to spend time in Asia. Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. Australia's relation ship with Asia is no abstract thing when it's so much quicker to go north than come down south.
That night I read at Off The Page at the Groove cafe in Nightcliff. After the headline act, the winner of the Northern Territory Book of the year award, Andrew McMillan, author of 'An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land'. The place was packed to the gills and had an enormous amount if energy. More than me in fact - after 4 hours I was done, but the night went on a lot longer with lots of people taking part in a very energetic open-mic event.
Darwin had well and truly wrung me dry. I collapsed in a heap and prepared to begin my 1500 km drive to Alice Springs. The first stop was Katherine, where I was speaking at the International Women's day afternoon tea. We stopped to swim at Edith Falls .
but it was the tail end of the wet season and a couple of crocs had found their way into Katherine Gorge a few days earlier rendering one of the world's more beautiful swimming holes un-swimmable. I don't know if there is a word for the insatiable desire to swim and that desire being unrequited, but there should be. It wouldn't be until I got to Bitter Springs a few days later that I got to leap into (not so deep) water myself. 
It's late: I'll blog on Katherine tomorrow.
Permalink