I put a spell on you

My father told me before I came here that people who relocate to Alice Springs are running away from something. At the time I dismissed this as another of my father's cynical quips. But I realise now that I came here to get away from many things. Whether I was "running" I'm not sure. I prefer the phrase "moving rapidly away from." My flat mate also came here to forget something. Or perhaps "forget" is also the wrong word. To "be healed" of something is more appropriate. So maybe my father was right. Alice Springs is a good place to come to if you wish to put distance between yourself and something in your previous life.

I feel that I have been healed by my time here. When I first arrived I believed that Alice Springs had a magical quality. Some unique spiritual element that bewitched me. Part of it was being surrounded by red rocks dotted with dusty green spinifex, part of it was the ever present sunshine, part of it was the sense of community Alice Springs has. But the largest part of it has been the close friendships I've developed with the three women I moved here with. We all are away from our family and friends and so we became those things for each other.

One of the most healing elements of moving to a new place with new people is that you get to be a new version of yourself. Your history and the well worn trade routes of other relationships do not weigh upon you. You are free to explore a little, to try change, to fail, to be more honest and less afraid. Maybe Alice Springs does possess mystical qualities. Or maybe it was just that the right people were in the right place at the right time.

Kata Tjuta

"In the finished symmetry of its domes it is beautiful at all times; but now the sunset works upon it a miracle of colour, and it glows a luminous blue against an orange field, like some great mosque lit up from within. Five times I saw the sun set beyond Mt Olga but in five hundred times it would not pall. It is the most delicate sight in all the land." H. H. Finlayson 1936.

Galahs, dirt and basil

This is the first night I've spent alone in Alice since I moved here 3 months ago. The weeks go by so fast. The weekends are a flurry of drinking and other things. I knew the time would go by fast before I came here. I wanted it to. "Time heals all wounds." Logic, then, dictates that the more time you can get between yourself and the wound, the better.

Is it better not to think? Is it better to become absorbed in a new way of life until it doesn't hurt anymore? I don't know. I guess there is no healthy way. No "normal" way. 

Look at me - all gloomy on my night alone. I may be gloomy but it feels nice to have the space to be melancholy for once. It's nice to have space enough to think. 

I'm sitting at the dining table in a beautiful house. It's not my house. We're house sitting for our neighbours. The house is filled with Aboriginal art. Every wall is crammed with dots and colours and patterns and stories. This is exactly the kind of house I hope to live in one day, when I'm older and have my shit together. There are pots full of basil and parsley and oregano in the back yard. The bookshelves are lined with interesting and important titles without being pretentious. The animals that live here are affectionate strays that found a home. When the owners were here the kitchen always had dinner cooking and bottles of nice red wine open. At the moment there's dinner cooking and cheap cask wine. But that sits ok with me.

Last night my flat mates and I went to "boot camp" (a hideous outdoor exercise class we mistakenly enrolled in). As we flung our protesting bodies up Billy Goat Hill (as they call it) I saw a rusty brown kangaroo bound away across the rocks. It's not every day you see something like that.

And here's something else for you - every morning I leave the house for work and across the road my neighbour's yard is full of pink and grey galahs, quietly milling about. How'd you like them apples?

Sometimes it's nice to be alone for long enough to contemplate the galahs, the red dirt and the basil in the back yard.

Last night I heard the screaming

On Friday night this week my flat mates and I held a small dinner party. We drank red wine. The entree was broccoli and chilli soup. The main was carrot and ricotta filo parcels. We had a rather disastrous custard and raspberry tart for dessert which provided much amusement. At around 11p.m. we decided to go into town to see a band and all six of us hopped into Danielle's five seater car. 

As we pulled out of the driveway, Danielle slowed the car, looking in her rear vision mirror. A woman was running towards our car, chased by a man. She was shouting to us to stop. We wound down a window to speak to her, but she kept circling the car, keeping the car between herself and the man. He chased her around and around. She was screaming. We locked our doors.

I called the police. It was the first time I have ever called the police. While I was on the phone everyone in the car was shouting. Someone shouted "I think she's pregnant." The woman on the end of the phone asked me "Are they Aboriginal or white?" I was so surprised by her question. I hesitated and said "They're both Aboriginal." The voice on the end of the phone seemed to be asking me more and more irrelevant questions. "You need to send someone now," I kept repeating. Her attitude to my call seemed to change markedly after she learned the race of the woman. I had a sinking feeling that the police would not come.

We drove around the block and called the police again. But by this time the woman and the man had gotten into a car and were driving away from the house. We watched as they drove straight past us. We gave the police the number plate and make. This time the question was "Are they caucasian or Indigenous?" 

We still drove into town to see our band. We drove in silence. Half an hour later the police called us back and said they'd attended the premises and they were vacant. I don't believe that they would have gone out at all, had we not placed the second call. 

Later in a bar, we sat drinking gin. All of us felt very strange about what had happened. Should we have opened the car door, pulled her in and driven her to the women's shelter? Could we have done more? We live in that street - is it right think of our own safety before someone else's? What happened to her?  Should we have let her know that we called the police so that she wouldn't have gotten in that car? 

It's very easy to walk around with blinkers on. We are all aware of the rates of domestic and family violence here and on community but I have never seen it. It's easy to sit next door and drink red and talk about social justice. It's not easy to see a woman being threatened with violence. It's not easy to work out what to do about it. It's not easy to genuinely commit to helping. And it's definitely not easy for the people who live it. 

The magnificence and the tragedy

I write this with a vodka apple cranberry by my bed. I just got off the phone from a friend who tells me he's going to see a movie called "Wake in Fright" this Saturday. It's showing as part of the Sydney film festival this year. It's the movie they made of my grandfather's novel of the same name. Apparently the original negatives of the film have been lost for years and two men made it their business to track down the only surviving copy, which happened to be in a warehouse in Pittsburg, marked "to be destroyed." So much of life is accidental.

To me the re-release of this film has huge significance. It's come at an extremely turbulent time in my family's history. We've suffered recent tragedy. On top of less recent but still fresh tragedy. My grandfather's personality, though he died when I was three, has been a strong influence in my life for as long as I can remember. In some ways his personality serves as a thread that runs through our family, making sense of the magnificence and the tragedy. He had a remarkable talent. He was a story teller. He told stories about the great Australian outback. Stories about the harsh brutality, the surprising beauty and the complexity and simplicity that co-exist out here. We all aspire to greatness, to making a decent contribution, and I've always felt I wanted to live up to his legacy.

At my uncle's funeral, before I came to Alice, I was suddenly struck by how important it is to have lived a life, which when you die, people who knew you will say you lived a worthwhile life. Say that you contributed something. My uncle contributed a huge amount. Everyone contributes in different ways. I may not write novels like my grandfather. I may not defend the rights of the oppressed and systematically disadvantaged like my uncle. But I will add to the dialogue. The stories of the past that contribute to our present and future should never be underestimated.

A vision of metropolitan glamour

Change is a gradual process. Often, while we are changing as human beings, we are not aware of the process of change. It can be so gradual in fact, that you will not suspect a thing, until one day BAM! you wake up and realise that your sole criteria in a prospective male partner is the ability to spell correctly.

This can be troubling for some people. Others embrace change. I think that I first became aware of the change I had gone through when my old friend from Sydney came to visit me last weekend. As he stepped out of the cab he looked somewhat like a movie star to my Alice Springs-oriented eyes. He looked clean and suave, like someone from a magazine and sported a pair of stylish Wayfarers. He spoke in whole sentences and didn't have bloodshot eyes. His palms were soft, from a life as something other than a "bacon and egg builder." In Sydney, my friend seems relatively normal, but after two months in Alice Springs he appeared to me like a vision of metropolitan glamour. 

Despite the relative rarity of men that don't spell "great" as though it's something one does with parmesan cheese, I'm coming to think there's a certain magic about this town. There's something about the slow-paced, community-oriented lifestyle in Alice Springs that is extremely seductive. I love my metropolitan glamour, Wayfarers and all (and it's possible that once ensconced in Sydney life again, the romantic hue around the Alice will fade) but, cycling home this afternoon, the sky was a clear blue backdrop to the red ochre Macdonnell Ranges and I thought "It just doesn't get much better than this."

Pink Satin and Black Velvet

We've been invited to a fancy dress party. You cannot begin to imagine how ridiculously exciting this is. It's not even being held by racist, beer swilling miners! It's being held by a group of our potential new best friends. 

We procured this invitation at last Saturday's anti-uranium mining rally. Many of the town's concerned citizens gathered on the council lawns to register their outrage over the mining site

 Angela Pamela (personally I prefer calling it Pamela Anderson, but it's up to the individual.) Many a cruel word was spat at my love god, Peter Garrett. I found it extremely distressing.

I feel the same way about Peter Garrett that my mum feels about me committing violent crime. She always says to me, "Even if you murdered someone, I'd still love you." This is usually a preamble aimed at tricking me into confessing the smoking of illegal substances or the acquisition of body art. I'm not trying to trick Peter Garrett into confessing multiple nipple piercings or anything, but the point remains that the affection I feel for him is so strong, so true, it cannot be shaken. Not even by a group of my potential new best friends shaking their fists and dreadlock-ridden heads at him.

But the point is, that I'm going to an extremely cool fancy dress party tomorrow night. The theme is "Escape from the Circus." I have spent the majority of my weekly budget (which in this case constitutes sixty bad boys) on the most fabulous outfit of all time. I may have to be shoe-horned into my pink satin negligee, and I may explode out of it unceremoniously at the party after eating one too many cheezels, but my god, it will be worth it.

Halleluiah

The mystery has been officially resolved. We have discovered the non-racist population of Alice Springs. They have elluded us for some time but this weekend gone by, we finally tracked them down. We came across this unique sub-species in the wilderness at Ross River.

They were congregating at what is called a "Desert Doof," headlining such bands as "Combat Wombat" and "Urth Boy." The Non-Racists adorn themselves in multi-coloured felt bead necklaces, their hair is often matted into thick strings and many of them carry dirty, naked screaming children around where ever they go. They often shout phrases such as "Fuck Bush."

Having discovered the Non-Racists, our next task was to infiltrate their ranks. On Saturday night we decided that if we were to blend in, we would have to take some extreme measures. These extreme measures took the form of wearing thermal underwear on the outside of our clothing and me pinning a half-finished hand crocheted beanie to my head (I prepared this earlier in the day, during a beanie making and bush tucker workshop, of course.)

Whilst our outfits seemed wild when we put them on, we were outdone almost immediately by three girls wearing cask wine bags as bikini tops with the nozzles over their nipples. Two of our team became dissuaded and headed back to the tent, defeated at 9p.m. But I stood my ground. I surveyed the crowd. I figured my best bet was the man in the black Betty Boop wig, who was foaming at the mouth. I successfully befriended him and procured myself an invitation to a vegan dinner party the following weekend. I congratulated myself on a job well done as I headed back to the tent at 3a.m. and was lulled into a restful slumber by the rhythmical hammering of trance music.

Have a drink mate? Have a fight mate?

You know that something is not quite right when the person standing next to you on the peanut-ridden floor of "Bo Jangles Saloon" turns to you and says "Your eyes aren't even blood shot - of course you should have another drink."

Bo Jangles Saloon is pretty much the highlight of the night scene in Alice. It is the first time I have ever experienced being in a bar that advertises that it has live feed. No, this does not refer to sick satanic animal sacrifice, but to the greater evil of online voyeurism. Yes, it's true, you can watch people drinking themselves into a stupor, throwing peanut shells on the floor and rubbing up against each other in time to such classics as "Loosen up my Buttons," "So Crazy Right Now" and "The Time Warp," at www.bossaloon.com.au.

Other great features of Bo's include its western-style saloon doors ala "Back to the Future 3,"the skeleton wearing a cowboy hat, and red faced men everywhere force feeding themselves rum and cokes. Can't wait to join in the fun? Neither could I.

"Samson and Delilah"

Last Friday night we caught a cab up to Telegraph station to watch a free outdoor screening of "Samson and Delilah" a love story set in Alice.

The cab dropped us off and we walked through the dark bush with dozens of people carrying picnics and chairs. We arrived to the melodious sounds of a band called something like “Desert Death Metal (apologies if this is but a loose interpretation of the band’s name).” 

Besides the sheer musical genius of “Desert Death Metal,” what struck me first was that there were nearly equal numbers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers assembled, waiting for the film to begin.

Although there are more Indigenous people in Alice than I have ever seen before, the cultures seem very separate here, in every day life. White people and Aboriginal people in the town seem, for the most part, to stay out of each other’s way. But on Friday night, it felt that everyone had come together for the same thing, to watch a movie about Alice. That in itself made the event feel unique.

The screen was framed on either side by huge ghost gums. The film was remarkable. Samson and Delilah’s romance played out with not a word spoken between them. The film managed to capture humour and tenderness inside a tragedy. Samson and Delilah were both exquisitely beautiful and unaffected actors. The events of the film were horrifying, because of the unavoidable truths it presented. We’re used to film being a genre that allows escapism but whilst watching this film all I could think was “this really happens to people, this is real.”

Sitting under the ghost gums, at the Alice premiere of this film, listening to the proud shouts when a friend’s face came up on the big screen or when the local Coles was recognised, I felt privileged to be here in Alice Springs, and really felt a part of something special.

"Can Do" Women

I am sitting on the patio at my new home in Alice Springs. Shaded from the sun's harsh rays by elegant bottle green shade cloth, I gaze upon the visage of our hills hoist and the ceramic dog wearing a hat, named Reginald Percival the 2nd. Life doesn't get much better than this.

Our garden is actually rather lovely, all jokes aside. We have an enormous lemon tree, full of fruit and three white rose bushes. We're all rather concerned that they may not survive our four month tenancy. After careful consideration, watering them seems like the way to go.

My three youthful, exuberant companions and I have all become domestic goddesses, we think. We were off to a roaring start on night one when, full of good intentions, we came home armed with the ingredients for a roast dinner. By eight p.m. we had everything ready to go and went to turn on the oven. An hour later, we had all stuck our heads too far inside the oven, singed our fingers, dropped gas bottles on our feet and argued extensively. Someone suggested we get a taxi to Macdonalds. Another suggested taking our raw bird next door and wooing the next door neighbour into letting us cook it in his oven. 

As it turned out, we wooed our next door neighbour into coming over and fixing the oven for us. "Fixing" is a relative term in any case, as it was a matter of holding the knob down whilst lighting the gas. "They just don't make them like that in Sydney," we said, shaking our heads.

There have been moments over the past week when I've felt like Paris Hilton's sillier, sweatier and less attractive twin in The Simple Life. But not to worry, my three robust companions and I have vowed that by the end of our time here, we will be "can do" women, for whom no challenge is too mighty. Stay tuned.

No more endo, gin and juice

What is it about farewells and large amounts of alcohol? And in this case cigarettes too? It's nearly inevitable that you will have important things to do the day after you consume these large amounts of alcohol and cigarettes, such as catch planes, pack, write blogs, and make sense when you talk to your parents. However it is very difficult indeed to escape the consumption of large amounts of alcohol when going anywhere at all. For example, I was merely on my way to university for a 9a.m. lecture last week when a man sprang from the bushes and insisted I share a glass of fine French champagne with him. It's not right, I tell you.

Wake in Fright

"Wake in Fright" is a working title that I have shamelessly poached from my grandfather. Perhaps as things progress, I will find something of my own that suits. But for now, it will have to do. I chose the title because my grandfather's novels have inspired me to see outback Australia. I chose the title because of the nights of the week gone by when I have woken, frightened at 5 a.m. I chose the title because my grandfather was a brilliant writer, whose work I have always aspired to emulate. This blog is my first public attempt to do so.

I am moving to Alice Springs on Sunday. I find this slightly baffling. It's one of those notions that seem like a very good idea while sipping Beer Laos by the river in 2008, but by 2009 seem bizarre and somehow unnecessary. Beer Laos leads you to shout magnanimously at your Australian companion about discovering one's own country and combi-vans (in various combinations.) Beer Laos lead me to fill in the application form for a rural social work placement. I blame Beer Laos.

In 2009, my magnanimous attitude towards outback Australia has become one of mild apprehension and, to be honest, total denial. I haven't packed. I haven't found anywhere to live. I don't know anyone there. When people politely ask me about my imminent move, I only grunt in reply. I have stuck my head in the sand dune, as it were. In fact, if we were really to analyse things, this blog is one of those elaborate procrastinations that appear to be in support of your overall goal, but is actually you putting things off.

My denial is mainly the product of ignorance. I know very little about Alice Springs or what I should expect when I arrive.

What I know so far about Alice Springs: 1. It might be very cold (the phrase "below freezing" was used in my placement interview and I am having trouble reconciling this with the words "outback" and "desert") 2. It's depressing (see next paragraph) 3. Food is expensive 4. Aboriginal people are not allowed to drink in the pubs.

Reactions to my move are fairly evenly divided into two groups. The group that thinks it's going to be a wonderful, soul-enriching experience and the group that says, "You're barking mad - Alice is a hole." What worries me is that on further questioning, only the latter group tend to have actually been there.

"Wake in Fright" (the original) is a story about the harsh brutality of the outback and of human beings in their behaviour towards themselves and each other. This is a rather pessimistic first posting in what I hope will be a good experience. I wonder, will I find the Australian outback harsh and brutal? Will the people I find there be harsh and brutal? As a social worker I expect things will be difficult but ultimately I expect that I will find that Beer Laos was on to a good thing when it made me sign those forms.