Abandoned on Penguin Island

I’d picked up a leaflet on Penguin Island – a bird sanctuary in Rockingham, not far from Perth.  I find myself disgruntled and moody about being in an ordinary city again and the island trip seems to offer a last look at the wild world I’ve come to feel so much at ease in.  Grant is just about amenable, though nature is not his thing. and so we set out for Rockingham, guided by the trusty GPS which is speaking with an Aussie accent today. This is a relief as the American voice that takes over now and hen often mixes up left and right.

We get to the little seaside town in time to book our dolphin watching trip which includes visiting a sea lion beach as well as the feeding of misfit orphan penguins who cannot yet be let go into the wild.

The café by the dock is swarming with elderly bikies in leather jackets with their gleaming machines all lined up outside.  I observe that one or two of them glance approvingly at me in my akubra hat and laugh at myself for feeling pleased at being appreciated by these gentlemen of the road.  Old age does do away with girlish shyness. I ask on if they’ve come to see the penguins. “Shit no!” one says, looking  a mite offended.

We get on our boat, only six of us, and the wind and the sea blow away my moodiness.  I lurch about trying to catch a glimpse of a dorsal fin or two. Grant however sits tight on his bench chalking up brownie points for giving me such a nice time.  And it is so lovely.  We pass an islet with a huge osprey’s nest on it.  Apparently ospreys mate for life and improve their nest each year. ( I’m reminded that we’ve got to do something about the kitchen when we get back – can it really be the day after tomorrow?) There are these muscular looking pied cormorants who swim on the waves like ducks and then dive into the depths for their fish.  We are told that unlike most birds, they don’t have oil in their feathers and  so get waterlogged which helps them stay sunk long enough to catch fish.  When they come up they have to flap their wings dry in the wind if they want to fly.

Then we see dolphins – a group of mothers and calves.  Our guide is ecstatic. 

“They are playing.  They are having such fun”

And indeed perhaps they are. They are black and sleek with what looked like smiles on their rostrums. They rise and snort out of the air holes on their heads.  We can see the calves alongside the mothers who suckle them but never feed them fish.  It’s tough love in the dolphin world.  The calves have to learn to do it for themselves.  They actually stay with their mothers for about six years so that they can.  We are told that it’s quite an ordeal being a female dolphin.  A group of up to a hundred males will hold a female hostage and have her mate with them.  This is actually a good thing because the resulting calf could belong to any one of them and so none of them kill it.  A mother who has had only a couple of mates has to be very protective.  I think of the ospreys and their home improvements and how they seem so like us.  These dolphins on the other hand have some very different customs.

I begin to wonder if it right to assume that it is fun they are having   as they jump and dart about our boat.  Could it be that they have a cosmic memory of whales and harpoons and really want us to go away.  “We are going to make a wave now so they can have a surf”  says the guide and our boat speeds up and sure enough there is wonderful graceful leaping over the foam of the wake as we speed away.  I hope our visit was nice for them but I think it a bit presumptuous to assume that it was.  Could the surfing just be a way of saying “Good riddance”

We stop just inside the little bay of an island full of birds of all sorts – pelicans, cormorants and seagulls all perched and looking at us attentive as meercats. On the beach are sluggish sea lions.  One is reared up as though for a portrait.  I am forced to revise my rather disrespectful view of sea lions as ill favoured creatures to be pitied for their cumbersome design.  Apparently they can run as fast as thirty kilometers an hour and they bite like bears.

Our last encounter is back on Penguin Island.  The orphanage  has a pool in the middle with platforms around it for the penguins to walk on and jump off  There are tiers of benches surrounding the pool  with lots of  children as well as adults waiting for the keeper to come with her bucket of fish.  “Aaah” we say as two fairy penguins emerge from their burrows to stand, looking this way and that on the edge of the pool.  A low chuckle passes through the adults in the crowd as the couple advance on each other and begin vigorously to copulate.  The keeper hangs back with her bucket.  We hear her complaining later to another wildlife person “I had a hundred kids there with two bonking penguins.  What was I supposed to say?”  Actually once she got going she told us lots, including the fact that the penguins in question were actually both male.  One was blind which meant he would not survive in the wild.  The others, about six who emerged from their boxes for the little fish, were injured or abandoned by their mothers and would eventually get to join the other 900 odd penguins living around the island.

After the feeding I told Grant I was going round the boardwalks that circled the sanctuary island and he said he’d stay and read his emails in the penguin house.  It was windy and all around were male seagulls, their red mouths agape and screeching.  There was little doubt in my mind about them wanting me to go away.  All around the boardwalks were mother gulls sitting like china birds on their nests, plump and still.  One or two had a couple of fluffy brown chicks with them.   I wandered through the cacophony feeling intrusive but also awed to be so near the colony.  As usual I got a bit lost and I couldn’t cut across the island lest I harm a nest so it was quite a while before I got back to the penguin house and there was no Grant to be seen. The penultimate ferry of the day was pulling out.  Enquiries about a man with long silver hair and beard confirmed my suspicion that he’d got fed up and taken the ferry, which didn’t seem unreasonable under the circumstances.  The penguin lady, was however outraged.  “You mean he left you behind?” she said.  In her book it was deviant  human behaviour. Indeed I was mildly outraged myself. What were mobile phones for?  In the end the ferry came back with four Japanese girls who had pleaded to be taken to the island in time for the four o’clock feeding.  My champion, the penguin lady ran down to the quay to stop the ferryman before he left so I could get on board this extra run.

Grant was snug back in the van with a beer and my protest was only token even though I’d promised the penguin person to tear a strip off him for not behaving like a model human.  I wondered if all those coupled creatures had days like this, seagulls getting tired of protective squawking, mother dolphins slipping their calves the odd fish just to shut them up.  How standard can all we creatures be expected to be when all is said and done?

Bogan Bingo, the Earthquake and the Golden Pipeline

For the last two days we have had an intermittent companion on the road.  Sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the left a great pipe runs alongside us. Now and then it vanishes for a bit.  “Where’s the pipe gone?” we say but it always comes back, sometimes rusty and dark and sometimes bright white.  It is the water pipe that runs up hill from Perth to the dry gold fields at the other end.  Before its arrival water cost a shilling a bucket and was produced by evaporating and distilling salt water.  It was begun in 1896 and completed in 1903. Its inventor, C Y. O’Connor however never saw his water run because he rode into the sea and shot himself after being harassed and accused of corruption by his contemporaries the year before the pipe was put into commission.  It is a lovely pipe but looks so vulnerable.  We wonder what happens when bits need replacing.  There must be some kind of open heart surgery arrangement with bypasses I suppose.

It’s nice to have the pipe with us because for the first time in our long journey the drive is a bit boring.  There are huge flat wheatfields to be got through.  They look so sterile compared to the grand bush and it is easy to imagine how the aboriginal population must have hated the stripping of the land to plant the wheat.  There are a couple of interesting stops though.  One is the little town of  Merredin with a row of thriving shops including a bakers.  I am intrigued by a notice in many shops advertising Bogan Bingo in June for $33.  It seems a lot for a bit of Bingo. I pop into the pub to find out what it is and the barmaid gestures to a poster which explains “Half party, half parlour game and Australian as a Bali Prison” I think they must have a lot of fun in Merredin.

The second stop is at the site of Australia’s biggest ever earthquake,6.9 on the Richter scale.  The little town of Meckering was totally destroyed on 14^th October 1968 but nobody died. A broken collarbone was apparently the worst injury. The Meckeringians have preserved the ruin of the Snooke family’s house which is like other ruins except for a sign stuck in the middle of the rubble “Baby’s cot here”  Apparently Mrs Snooke was hanging out the washing when the quake occurred and rushed in to rescue her baby girl.  Luckily the wall beside her cot had collapsed outwards and she was unharmed.  I wondered if her miraculous escape had influenced her life.  One would surely feel a bit special.  In the information centre I was shown a photo of her on her wedding day – tall and beautiful with her smaller parents. 

We are rather uplifted by this unusual good news story and chug on more cheerfully to Perth.

Kalgoorlie and the Golden Hole

The caravan park in Norseman is my favourite sort – large, a bit shabby, no jumping pillows for kids and no keyboards on the amenities.  It sort of melts into the woody landscape which is populated by little flocks of noisy green parrots. There’s a gate in the corner which leads in to what is a huge golf course, though not knowing anything about golf, it didn’t seem like that to me. No green lawns and humps – just twiggy woodland and the odd clearing with deeply rutted red soil.  Every so often there is, I think it is called a tee, sponsored by someone – the butcher for instance.  It’s a nice walk for me but there isn’t a soul here.  It’s difficult to imagine people chatting along with bags of clubs.

 The hop from Norseman to Kalgoorlie is quite quick.  On the way we see one of the FIFO accommodation places.  It’s a petrol station with cars parked higgledy piggledy in front of it and  the cabins behind.  It looks tough and not like a place one would want to stay in for any longer than ten days straight.

As we approach Kalgoorlie we become aware of the huge upheaval in the landscape brought about by the gold mining,  Slag heaps great and small and fenced off mine shafts. Tumbled earth with tussocks of grass trying to get a grip.  Rusty machinery and rigs not unlike small Eiffel towers

We get to Kalgoorlie in daylight and in time to do a tour of a historic brothel which I’ve written all about in another blog. .  

Kalgoorlie is a  fine town which bears witness with the wealth that has come from all the gold and apparently will continue to do so until 2021 when the mighty Superpit open cut mine will run out of puff. There are glorious sprawling pubs on the corners of the main streets,  elegant and ornate government buildings.  Lots of modern shops like Subway at road level but above them the old signs for Tailors, Drapers and so on.  It is a town that loves its past and in some way incorporates it without a whiff of phoniness into its present.  You often see men with huge beards and dessicated faces and bright little eyes just like cartoon miners.  But they are for real.  They are out there with their metal detectors and shovels.  A car passes with the disconcerting word “Explosives” written on the side. 

I am at first puzzled by the chalkboards outside the pubs that say “Tonight’s skimpy is Jess” or Susie or whatever.  I wonder if they are racing tips and when I ask the young girl in the caravan park what a skimpy is and she laughs. “The barmaids aren’t naked or anything. Just bra and pants or a bikini”  The pubs themselves are old and cheerful.  One has a mine shaft in the floor where miners used to toss nuggets for retrieval later rather than hand them over to their employers. It has a grubby glass panel over it now.  It’s a bit of a puzzle.  I mean, how did they know whose was whose later on?  When we went to the museum later I got a possible answer.  Nuggets are very individual, having been worn into strange shapes and the lumps of gold bearing minerals are different too.  Perhaps pinching someone else’s nugget was as difficult to get away with as kidnapping his baby.

There are actually two towns which have more or less become one.  Kalgoorlie came first and then Boulder was established to be nearer the diggings.  We were lucky to arrive on market day in Boulder when the big mining company runs a free bus tour up to the open cut mine.  I didn’t realize it was a mine tour or I might not have gone as I was by then a bit jaded with picks and shovels and gold pans etc.  But I am so glad I did because it was one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever seen.  I wish Shakespeare could have seen it in all its splendour and horror.  We wound our way up to it on the mud roads in a rather posh modern bus.   On either side were ghastly mountains of rock.  Our very good guide told us what was what, some of the rock was minimal gold bearing and some better.  There were also rather poignant piles of timber carefully separated out as they muck up the crushers and cause thousands of dollars worth of damage.  They are the result of the open cut mine gobbling up the tunnels and shafts that had been hand dug by the original prospectors.

Our guide has a Scottish accent and was once miner himself. He tells us lots of facts and figures about the mighty trucks to which no photograph does justice because they are simply so enormous.  Tossed about are old tyres cracked and crusted with mud.  Finally we get to the top of the pit itself.  Nothing has prepared me for its depth. It is the biggest hole I have ever seen. Way way down below us the big trucks look like woodlice and doggedly crawl along the terraces. We can hear nothing for the savage wind which is blowing as if it is angry with this place.  Right at the bottom of the pit gleams water, apparently several times the salinity of the sea . All of it seems the opposite of anything human. I cannot deny its glory, but it seems mad that all this is not for needful things like bread or water but for gold, two thirds of which is made into jewellery.   It makes no sense at all.  But then what does.

Kalgoorlie and That House in Hay Street

I had a dream last night, made up of fragments of the day as all dreams are but also encompassing a deep unease about an experience we’d had.  The dream began with some naughty aboriginal children plus one of mine tearing across one of the wide camel friendly roads of Norseman.  I was worried and flew in hot pursuit.  I found them deeply absorbed in playing with little Leggo cars on the real road with other traffic driving by as best it could.  One of the children was lying dead.  “He got hit” my child said casually.  And I woke at that.

But the experience was a visit to a “historical brothel” on Hay Street in Kalgoorlie which used to be the containment area for prostitution in the town until not so very long ago. There was plenty of money to be made from gold miners far from home. But there was a price to pay for making it. The girls had to live in the brothels and were not allowed into town alone lest they solicit there and cause anxiety to respectable townsfolk.  Police could do spot checks at night to make sue everyone was present.  Girls could not live in town once they’d been prostitutes unless they married a client, which they sometimes did.

But this information was not what troubled me.  Perhaps I should go back to how the tour began.  I rang to book and was answered by a cultured, friendly and very sexy voice.  “Just come to the door at a quarter to three” she said “ and I accept cards or cash” Something about the way she said it made it seem like a sleazy transaction.

Grant and I found our way to shabby Hay Street and located Questa Casa, with its four doors painted pink, one of which was open.   An elegant woman of a certain age beckoned us in and we joined a group of about fifteen all tucked in a little room behind the counter.  All sorts we were, young and old, male and female, different nationalities too.  The lady came in and sorted us like children, short ones in the front and tall ones in the back and had us sit on chairs.  She sat down herself.  “I am the madam here” she said in a soft and pleasant voice.  “We used to have four working rooms but now we just have two”.  She told us how a couple of decades ago she had been very depressed after being widowed and thought it was her hormones.  Her doctor said it wasn’t her hormones at all but she did need something to do.  She spotted the ad offering the brothel in Kalgoorlie for sale and bought it.  When she told her doctor what she had done he said “But I meant charity work!”  She made us laugh and got us under her spell. 

She showed us how the brothel, along with all the others in Hay Street (the rest now shut down) had a high iron fence with doors in it leading into what were known as “the starting stalls” The girls would sit on chairs inside the wrought iron inner door and the gentlemen could negotiate privately from the cubicles.  If things went well they were let through the door into the brothel proper. 

We were given a tour of two rooms one of which was the domination room, appropriately (and somewhat theatrically) equipped.  A large teddy bear was elaborately chained for our education,  “They come because they cannot forgive themselves” she said “It is our job to hurt them but without doing any harm”  That sadness came into her eyes as it had when she told us about being a widow.

We went back to the close little room in which we began and she organized us again by height and began to tell stories of different sorts – the policeman who tried to trap her into sending a girl to the Exchange Hotel.  Because of the containment rule this was not allowed and if she had agreed he would have been able to shut her down.  The narcoleptic client who apparently died on the bed but sprang to life after the police and an ambulance had been called.  All sorts of  tales as well as a description of how her girls got clients to climax with minimum effort.  Because of her gentle humorous manner none of us doubted her for a second. 

After we left I felt uneasy.  If it was all true it seemed like the prostitution of prostitution.  There seemed something a bit gross about us tourists listening in to salacious but essentially humorous  tales of a trade which must take a huge toll on its workers and surely couldn’t all be quite such fun.  At one point she asked us to guess the maximum number of clients that a Dutch girl had handled in a night.  So we were playing guessing games now.  But her power over us was such that we did what we were told.

I think my dream of kids (us tourists) playing with Leggo cars amongst the real traffic emanated from the moral issue of whether you should be entertained by real life sadness. Naughty us, were playing in the road and should know better. History – well that’s another thing. But this woman and the way she handled us seemed so real.

 Very slowly it began to dawn on me that perhaps she was just a superlative actress and maybe there was a different widowed  madam next day.  Perhaps it was all a splendid con.  But doubt lingered.  There was a notice outside saying the place was open for trade from six pm.  I suggested Grant go along as an undercover client and clear the matter up once and for all, but he said no – perhaps we could ask at the police station instead.  In the event a lovely man in the tourist office told us the rather pathetic truth. 

Yes she was a madam and had run brothels in Queensland but no – Questa Casa was no longer an active brothel because  girls these days formed syndicates and got themselves places around town to avoid having to split their earnings with a madam. These days she just gave her three o’clock tours to keep her head above water. I was sort of relieved and stopped feeling ashamed of myself but I was also amazed at our madam’s skill as an actress. Or was it actually not so much acting as living her role in the way that some hoaxers can do.  Never mind the domination room, she had got her way with us – but then of course we had asked for it.

Ennui at Fraser Range Sheep Station and Understanding Norseman

Today we have more or less finished our Nullarbor crossing and I’m a bit sad.  It feels like coming back to normal life. No more hypnotic hours on the road, no more quirky roadhouses.  Cocklebiddy actually had a wedge tailed eagle in a cage at the back and a sign at the front “Honk for wedge tailed eagles”  No more grand swaying road trains batting along.

It’s funny how some places make you feel good and others for no good reason simply don’t.  Fraser Range Sheep Station which is being developed as a clever tourist place, was like that.  We’d had our longest day’s drive yet (about 450 kms) and had booked two nights in “historic shearers stone cottage accommodation” as a treat, but  when it came to it I didn’t fancy  sleeping  outside the van and so we changed to a plain site.  The van has come to mean security over the weeks. I realized last night that it provides a walled bed that you can’t fall out of and I haven’t had one of them since I was a baby in a cot.  It is so snug with the curtains drawn and the world shut out

There were lots of people, mostly our age. being friendly round a campfire as well as a young couple from the UK on working visas to whom we bequeathed our sleeping bags having bought a luxurious quilt at Crestwick Wool Mill.  The place itself had a rose garden and carefully tended bushes round the sites as well as a cosy camp kitchen.  What was not to like?

 Dunno but both of us wanted to move on next day and it was good to get on the road and reach the puzzling little town of Norseman, named for a horse who pawed at the earth one night when tied up by his owner. Laurie Sinclair, and in the process unearthed a lovely gold nugget and triggered a rush.  But there is no rushing going on in Norseman now.  Some of the few shops have closed down and empty houses are to be seen in every street, Despite this, an air of civic pride prevails.  Every sign naming a road has a little pawing horse on it and four banners celebrating the town lead up to the central island upon which a some camels finely crafted from corrugated iron are grouped.  It seems a thoroughly good place to live.  The roads are wide because in the past the camel trains needed a big turning circle.  The houses are neat and there seems to be enough water.

The puzzle is solved for us by a woman called Patricia who is manning the till in the hardware store.  It’s almost closing time and she’s happy to chat. It’s FIFO – the way mining companies now fly in their workers for ten days, accommodate them in purpose built quarters and then fly them out for four days to bewith their families in places like Perth “Even New Zealand” she says witheringly. It’s that that has sucked the people out of the town.   There is an ad for a community development officer in the local photocopied paper.  What would we do, we wonder, to bring back people to Norseman?  Over wine in the van we come up with a plan. Refugees. The money wasted on detention centres could provide all sorts of support for settlement here.  The poor little monthly market made up of four stalls selling honey, candles, sausages and massage oil respectively could be full of exotic handicrafts and food.  Someone could bring back the camels perhaps…

Our informant Patricia who has been a truck driver in Woomera and Roxby Downs in the past, has faith.  Mining towns wax and wane and there seems to be serious investment in the wind.   And nothing will stop the place being a crossroads for travelers across the Nullarbor going to Esperance to the south and Kalgoorlie in the north. In fact Kalgoorli is beckoning us now.

The Nullarbor's not boring

I’m finding it difficult to blog today, perhaps because this part of the trip is hard to put in words.

After leaving Ceduna we have a long long drive through unchanging silver and dark green scrub. Despite road signs warning against camels, wombats and kangaroos we see none of them, Just road trains whomping past every so often and shaking the bejesus out of our van.  There’s a sense of endlessness on either side of the road that is rather peaceful but also intimidating.

Our first night we stopped at Nullarbor Roadhouse Caravan Park – a rather chilling place, full of caravans shut up tight like clams on the white ground and truck drivers in the bar, their faces glazed with fatigue and perhaps loneliness. There’s no camaraderie or the “east or west?” question here. We hop into our van ourselves, draw the curtains and have a gin and tonic.

In the morning everyone except us has driven off.  The caravan park is empty as the landscape.  I decided to have a little walk on the plain knowing for once I can’t get lost as the roadhouse is the only interruption in the landscape for as far the eye can see.  I set off feeling faintly absurd – there being not even a tree to aim for. No goal. No possible objective. There is a certain lesson in it for me.  This is life, just stepping out into the unmarked unknown.  Intentions not needed. Tomorrow will happen anyway and tomorrow after that.

Suddenly with my back to the road I begin to really see where I am – not on a desert but in a rich vibrant place.  Wombat holes chiseled into the red clay. Little silver salt bush puffs. Once this all used to be the sea and it feels that way – ancient and crumbly.  There are reportedly huge cave complexes underneath it all.  I hop across  white rocks and a spikey thorn penetrates my croc sole.  It doesn’t hurt me but makes me look where I step. Yesterday Pam in the Indigenous Culture Centre in Ceduna ran her finger over her tattered map to show the storylines of the area.  “Beautiful country” she rhapsodized and I got it at last. It is so different from the stern straight bushscape that we sped by all yesterday.  I feel like walking on and on but also feel the need for a pee.  I am inhibited, however by the lack of the merest bush to crouch behind. It seems rather exhibitionistic to pee on this huge stage. Way back sit the mighty articulated road trains and I just can’t face the sense of exposure so I turn around  and go back,  Perhaps its just as well because the call of the horizon is quite powerful.  I could have gone on for ever.

We set off again with the intention of getting to the roadhouse at Cocklebiddy because of the nice name but various off road temptations slow us down,  There is the Whale Watching  platform which is windy but very spectacular.  The whales haven’t arrived yet but  it is full of information,  The cove there is where mother whales have their calves and feed them up in the warmer water before their long migration in October.   Sometimes there are as many as a hundred whacking their tails and breaching.  I wish I could have seen them.  When I get back to the van, Grant has stuck a teeny whale on to the dashboard with bluetack which was nice of him.

Our next distraction was an old telegraph station half buried in a sand dune.  The beautiful brickwork was reminiscent of Macchu Picchu – all the stones locked together.  But it was fast falling apart under the pressure of the wind and the sand and all the graffiti will soon be gone along with the whole building.

We are now seriously behind schedule and the blinding afternoon sun makes the drive difficult.  As dusk begins to fall it is hard to see which side of the road the headlights are on and reluctantly we abandon Cocklebiddy as a destination and settle for a nearer roadhouse called Madura Pass Oasis, We are given a red key to the Mens amenity block but no key for the Womens’ which is open. If anything one would expect it to be the other way round. I wasn’t meaning to criticize but I was curious and so I ask about the disparity and get a scowl.  That’s apparently just the way it is.  I guess roadhouses get sick of travelers asking the same questions over and over again.  In fact there is a little trick that gets played in the roadhouse bars all across the Nullarbor.  A large notice above the bar features this sequence of letters

 YCWCYTDFTRFDSTY.

 Of course inquisitive people like me ask what the sign is for – perhaps a test to check you are not too drunk to order another beer?  With a grin you get told “Your Curiosity Will Cost Two Dollars For The Royal Flying Doctor Service Thank You”

But at last there are trees again and hardly anyone in this park. Despite being called an oasis there is no water for our van and no Dump Point.  It is also the most expensive site we've stopped at - $40 a night. There is one other caravan, however with a sign on the back CYCLIST AHEAD.  A ride is being done by a couple to raise funds  for kids’ cancer research. The guy is riding from Adelaide to Broome and wearing pink socks while his partner drives behind  with the van to protect him a bit. I wonder what it’s like when a road train goes by if you are on a bike.

 For once we are not the last to leave in the morning.  The cyclist and his partner are still in situ.  I hope he isn’t getting tired already.  He’s got a long way to go yet.

There is something just slightly gloomy  and inhospitable about Madura Pass Oasis Roadhouse and it is a relief to get to jolly little Balladonia, the hundred km further on. This roadhouse got an apology phone call from US President Carter when chunks of the US Sky Lab fell around the area in 1979  They’ve got a bit of its insulation in a glass case in the little museum there, A lucky lad in Esperance apparently got a reward of thousands of dollars for finding the first piece of the debris and sending it to President Carter. It must have all been so exciting for this little outpost.  There is also a picture of an elephant that came with a circus in the thirties with a note that unfortunately all the performing dogs died on the journey due to dust inhalation.  I think how lucky we are to have a sealed road and not be choked like the doggies.

Downs and Ups in Ceduna - the edge of the Nullarbor

My first impression is that Ceduna is  a sad and tough place. There seems to be a big alcohol problem here. An  aboriginal couple have been yelling at each other in their own language all afternoon, even raising stones (but not throwing them) outside the barbed wire of the caravan park.  It was sad to see and even sadder when I went into the  town and sensed the tangle of feelings there.  In the café I was greeted with friendliness but an aboriginal woman and baby with an adolescent girl got a rather wary “What can I do for you then darl?” Maybe it was my imagination. The woman ordered a pizza very exotic to my ears – crab, mussels and something else and it was happily supplied.  But everywhere there seemed a tension bordering on disgust. Aboriginal people looked the other way when I passed.  I went into a charity shop to find an apron (and did, it was a dollar, a bargain) and noticed a sign indicating that only shoes and clothes would be “put away”  It was explained to me that a curtain behind the counter was full of things selected but not paid for.  “We keep them a fortnight and then they go back on the shelves and we don’t put away big things”  To have to save up to buy second hand clothes suggests poverty indeed.

Feeling a bit  dispirited and slightly ashamed of being a caravan person with butterfish and cauliflower in the fridge I went on to the indigenous art and language centre and was uplifted by some really lovely paintings. I got into conversation with Lynnette who runs the language side of things. Herself aboriginal, she is passionate about  the centre and the vision she had for the whole place.  She told me about Maralinga and how the nuclear testing had wrecked whole communities by bundling them them off their land and how the authorities had neglected to get everyone out before the detonations.  Even now she reckons the wind brings the dust down to Ceduna and contributes to the high cancer rate.   Lynette is a woman of many parts.  She goes round Ceduna after work in a van to gather up the drunks and get them somewhere safe and warm for the night.  

Before we left for the drive across the desert we revisited the centre thinking we might get a small painting.  We each had a favourite but disliked each other’s and eventually settled on a dot painting involving a very blue waterhole.  The artist was working in the studio room and came out rather shyly to meet us.  She’d had a painting bought by a gallery in Switzerland, she said.  We felt lucky to get ours.  We had lunch at the training café in the back of the building,  Tasty potato with coleslaw rather surprisingly served in a MacDonald style box.  Apparently MacDonalds and KFC are coming to Ceduna soon and the centre is providing essential experience for aboriginal young people to put on their job applications.

It was cheering to see all this going on and I felt very happy to have been received with such warmth by these good people who spent ages telling us things we wanted to know.  Pam even gave me a twig from a medicine tree.  “What does it cure?”  I asked.”Everything” she said “Drink it like tea.”  And I shall.