Painting, a movie and a great big cake

There was a movie called “Bran Nue Dae” filmed in Broome a few years ago.  It was based on a musical comedy theatre production that ran for many years in Australia and is about a local Broome boy who is sent to boarding school in Perth but runs away.  It’s about his long road trip to get home to Broome.  We had a film night with the interpreters last night.  It was a perfect audience to watch it with.  Half the people in the film were related to people in the room.  They were singing along to all the corny songs and laughing really loud at jokes that you can only understand properly if you come from here (and are an aboriginal).  The folks sitting on the floor working on huge aboriginal art canvases just added to the atmosphere.  And there was a nice cake involved.  So very fun evening really.

The wall painting is almost ready.  It represents people from many different campfires coming together at a big campfire.  Basically, it's a record of the gathering of people at the interpreters conference.

Biting the Bullet

We took a whole convoy of SUVs down the river fishing yesterday. We were delayed at first while someone jumped out of a car to kill a goanna (“barney” is the traditional term for a goanna around here). Then everyone needed their photo taken with the goanna.

Then some of the old bush women decided they had brought bad weather because they hadn't gotten here in time for the traditional smoking ceremony.

So we had to smoke them before we went to the river. Then we had to cook the goanna. Then noone caught a fish. Then we stopped to gather firewood into a trailer. On the way home and the wheel came off the trailer.


I was offered a piece of the goanna, but I had heard that eating the fat from the goanna gives you dreadful BO. Of course you’d have to eat a lot of it. Still I wasn’t too keen to sweat pungent goanna oder.

Over dinner of salt beef and damper tonight, one of the interpreters “bit the bullet”. We were tucking into beef from the cow that Uncle Ernie had shot a couple of weeks ago. Lucky she didn’t break her teeth!

There has been much debate over the best way to cook damper. The folks from the APY lands use a camp oven. The East Kimberley folks fry it like a big pancake. Either way, it needs a lot of butter and honey.

The interpreters have officially gone through 400 tea bags in 4 days. That’s quite a haul for only 20 people. There is a widespread belief in Australia that aboriginal people have a problem with alcohol. Well, I can tell you, their real addiction is tea.

Is the water giggling?

A lot of excitment today. The interpreters are creating a huge art work to hang on the wall so the information center. These are real, full blooded, bush aborigines. I'll actually get to see how they do their art.


In one language, the term for "boiling water" translates directly to "giggling water". I thought that was kinda funny.

I was chatting with the trainer last night about the cultural "gratuitous confirmation". There is a general perception that aborigines are flakes. They say they will do something, then they don't show up. It's actually because culturally they CAN'T say no.  Even if they know they can't do something, they still say yes. Obviously that's going to cause some frustration and misunderstanding

Blood and Smoke

The aboriginal language interpreters started turning up today. This is the first time they have managed to get so many of them together in one place in order to conduct training. The goal is to help them learn the art of negotiating their work contracts and getting the word out in their communities that they are available to help if people get in trouble with the law, or need help explaining their medical problems to a doctor, or dealing with government agencies. There are still many communities in the Kimberley where English a second language or not spoken at all. There are two TAFE trainers who flew in from Adelaide to conduct the classes. It’s quite a social event (although these things tend to seem pretty low key). This group of 16 interpreters represent 32 of the languages spoken in the Kimberley.


The traditional smoking ceremony involves burning a special fragrant wood that is found in the Kimberley. It smells a lot like incense. Visitors need to be bathed in the smoke and given an official welcome. There is a traditional place near the springs where the tribes used to meet to socialize and trade. The smoking ceremony is usually conducted there.

I was cutting a box open yesterday to make a snake enclosure for a school project. We had already made a bunch of snakes out of paper plates. The scissors weren't working well, so I grabbed a knife out the kitchen draw. The damn handle disintegrated in my hand! It literally turned to dust! And the metal under the handle sliced my hand. It wasn't that bad, but it was bleeding and I didn't have anything at the school house to patch it up, so I told the kids to stay put, not get into any trouble while I went to find their Mum at the house to help me. The kids panicked, their Mum wasn't at the house, she was coming by in the car to pick them up for the smoking ceremony at the Springs. I hear them in the distance "Diana hurt her hand really bad. There's blood everywhere. We don't know if she's going to live." With that the Mum races over to check on me, realized it isn't that bad and heads off to the Springs. But the kids are busy telling all the interpreters that I'm on the brink of death and there is blood everywhere. When I got to the campfire last night, everyone (even people I didn't know) wanted to make sure my hand was okay. My clutzy reputation had preceded me. It was quite sweet.

I missed the Smoking Ceremoney because I had to patch up my hand, but I was smoked the first day I got here. So I’m okay.

Raining Dugong

We are in Broome for a couple of days to shop for the Interpreters conference. It was raining dugong here yesterday. The kids came running into the house excitedly saying they had seen a hawk drop a chunk of dugong on the driveway. I found this a little hard to believe, but they dragged me outside and there was a big square chunk of dugong blubber, about 4 inche square, with silver skin still attached. Some kids up the street had been cutting up a dugong. The hawk had come and snatched a piece that was too big for it to hold onto.


Now that's not something you see everyday.

Bush medicine

We've all gone crazy with power!!! So much electricity!!! Not enough things to turn on!


My voice completely disappeared yesterday. Now I'm feeling better, but my voice is coming out in a croak. Good thing we are studying frogs at the moment. The kids (after an initial phase of testing me at every turn) are now quite sweet and sympathetic. I'm sure it'll be a funny day doing the whole school in mime and croaks.

After school Simon and Angelina went into the bush to with a machete to find some bush medicine for my throat. I'm not sure if they got the right tree, because I brewed it into tea as they instructed. It tasted bitter as heck. The kids tried it and spit it out saying it didn't taste right. I had to eat chocolate to get the horrible taste out of my mouth.

I asked their Mum and it seems the kids did get the wrong bush medicine. Instead of sore throat medicine, they brought me the cure for cancer. That's why it tasted so horrible. You have to be really sick before you'd stomach the stuff. I only took a few sips and it won't do me any harm. And if I did unknowingly have cancer, I would now be cured.

The transit of Venus happened yesterday and in this part of the world it was visible from sunrise until noon. The sky is always clear at this time of year. We tried to pin hole method. It sucked. We then tried the binocular method. We couldn't tell the dust on the lens from a small planet passing before the sun. We then bit the bullet and tried the welders mask. There are conflicting reports of whether that is safe or not, so I only let the kids look for five seconds at a time. It was great. We saw the dot very clearly.

Apparently someone saw cherries at the supermarket here last week. We wonder where they could have come from, because it sure isn’t cherry season here. They must have come all the way from California. I'll have to sample them when I get to town to remind me of SF in cherry season. They sure have come a looooong way.

Buzzing with excitement

I’ve had a bad cold the last couple of days and today I've lost my voice. The kids will be pleased.


We had great excitement here today. We were sitting in class when all of a sudden I heard a buzzing noise. It seemed familiar. Like a long lost memory drifting through the room. Then I realized! It was the refrigerator humming!!!! We have power again!!!! The generator is officially fixed! We all stopped working and did a crazy electricity dance (which consisted mostly of jumping up and down and pretending to get an electrical shock). It's been three weeks since we got back to camp and had to make do with a couple of solar panels.

I took a long, hot, decadent shower in my own bathroom WITH THE LIGHT ON!!!! I might even turn on the AC just for the heck of it! Or have a nice cold glass of water from my nice chilly fridge. We are going to town on Friday to go shopping. I'm going to stock up on perishables BECAUSE I CAN!!!! Or play a DVD movie tonight (they are planning on keeping the generator going until 10pm from now on.

That's not normal!

We were making dinner yesterday (the kitchen is outside) and I looked up and there was something seriously screwy going on with the moon.  I tell you, a partial eclipse when you aren't expecting one is really freaky.  It lasted for hours.  I felt like an ancient Pagan praying for the return on the Moon.  Looking up every few minutes, hoping it was reappearing.

The Kill

Uncle Ernie has been in camp for the last couple of days. He’s a lot of fun to talk to around the fire at night. He was Chairman at one of the aboriginal settlements nearby for 12 years and spent many years as a tour guide around the Kimberley. He’s been promising to kills a cow for the past few days and has been driving around finding the juiciest looking specimen to shoot. The cattle on the property aren’t branded, so technically they belong to “the Crown”. To take ownership of the cattle, you just have to round them up and put your own brand on them. Or just shoot one and eat it.


I found him next to the barbeque this afternoon all splattering in blood with huge spare ribs roasting on the fire. He asked me if I wanted to see the beast, but I thought better of it.

That night they were butchering the animal and the various slabs of cow were hanging from the trees around the house. We still don’t have proper power, so I took a wander around the yard with my flash light. There was flesh hanging from every tree limb, near the kids swing set, over the table, near the shed. It looked like a scene from a horror movie. By morning it had all be packed into the freezers.