Writing a blog about writing a blog
Sitting in the Darwin pre-dawn in the heavy still air, the foliage verdant, listening to the first birds of the day and the occasional hissing growl of a possum. The morning star high in the east is still bright in the lightening sky, a bin is scraped along a driveway and an early morning car heads off, the deep growl of air brakes in the distance on the Stuart highway and a propeller plane wings around from the airport to the south.
After more than a year of imagining, I'm beginning my last day in Australia.
After three very stimulating years working in Lajamanu, I finished – for the time being – my job there, saying goodbye a fortnight ago for the last time. It was the best paid work I've done in my life, a pleasure and a privilege, often frustrating and confusing, sometimes infuriating, but always inspiring and rewarding, surrounded by the cocoon of love and concern of a society with much higher levels of social interaction and connectedness than my own. But a society under huge stress, the post-traumatic stress of dispossession and attack and the compound effects of those traumas creating new trauma. But, for the most part, that's the tragic background noise of life and in the everyday, people live with remarkable resilience, hope and humour striving to find a way for their society, community and themselves, to work out, as Stanner so eloquently put it a “decent union of their lives with ours, but on terms that let them preserve their own identity, not their inclusion willy nilly in our scheme of things and a fake identity, but development within a new way of life that has the imprint of their ideas” (p.28 Stanner, After the dreaming, 1968).
I left on a somewhat strange footing, my job finished, but with strong hopes to continue when I return, so it was a kind of see you when you're back (wiyarrpa / poor thing) rather than a goodbye. I'll be back for Milpirri in late October and, on some basis continuing work there with people. (May the funding gods smile!)
After leaving Lajamanu, there was Katherine to leave. Katherine has at best what may be described as the charm of the authentic, so it's hard to explain the peculiar hold that it has on my affections. I like it's smallness, it's closeness to nature, the warmth and heat and the heart-melting beauty of the landscape. As an Australian of many generations, who has no other place to call home, yet feels not totally at home, it's a privilege to be able to live with so many Aboriginal people, who have been helping make sense of my contradictory sense(s) of dislocation and belonging. Because, while Katherine is so ordinary in many ways, it's on the cutting edge of Australian national formation, a place where the same fundamental processes that began in Sydney harbour are still very alive, a place where the destructive impulses of the settler society are still harming Aboriginal people, a place where we can start the atonement, reconciliation and healing.
But, that, again, is the background noise of life, and such grandiloquent thoughts were far from my mind over the last few weeks as the Herculean task of packing up and cleaning ten years' worth of living into a shed and assorted friends' spare nooks and crannies began.
Moving from this …
to this …
to this!
Finally, finally, yesterday, with aching body and rings under my eyes, I left Katherine with Niamh, both of us so wrecked that we had to doze by the side of the road as neither of us could keep our eyes open.
So tired!
So, here we are in Darwin and, for the first time in many, many weeks, sitting quietly watching the day start, well-rested and calm.
Tomorrow at dawn we fly to Dili!