How to open a coconut

There is an old garden right in front of my veranda that still has sweet potatoes growing. Some of my cargo of carrots from the mainland didn't survive the journey, so I put them in the garden to make compost. A couple of the workmen came and started weeding my garden this morning. I'm not sure if it's their garden, or they saw my poor rotting carrots, thought “that's not how you grow carrots! This woman sure needs some help with her gardening!”

My new students came to help me decorate the schoolroom today. We have one room for “serious work” and a second room with two sofas that we have called “the library”.

Yesterday I collected a couple of coconuts from underneath a tree in the garden, but realized there was no way I could open them! I had to ask one of the workmen to get the thick, stringy husk off the nut. In the garden, there is a lean-to with a fire pit where some of the workmen sleep. I took the kids to translate into Pigin for me and one of them happily produced an enormous spike especially designed for the job. Now I just have to work out how to open the nut, how to grate the flesh, how to turn it into coconut milk and then simply add it to the curry I'm planning to make tonight. No problem! Or I could have bought coconut power from the shop in town. Maybe I'll learn my lesson next time.

The kids speak a strange mixture of English, German and Pigin. Since I understand two out of three, I can usually make out what they are saying. They know we only speak English in the schoolroom though. Part of the reason I'm here is to improve the children's English so they will be ready for boarding school and (hopefully) University in Australia.

Settling In

It's rather poetic when your “shopping” becomes “cargo”. Visions of the “cargo cult” of the Pacific Islands spring to mind. After two days of wandering the supermarkets in town with food prices that would make your eyes water ($10 for a box of Corn Flakes!!!), we finally set off for the island.

Usually the family has their own speed boat, but it has sprung a leak, so we made our journey on the local banana boat. After wending our way on a potholed road through the jungle for about an hour, we came to the “port” consisting of a bunch of people sitting on the roots of huge trees on the waters edge and three or four banana boats (a little bigger than a dingy and made of fibre glass) ties to the roots. My suitcase and some other small cargo was loaded onto a shipping palette at the center of the boat. The family, three other passengers and the two boatsmen scrambled on and I got pride of place at the front of the boat, sitting on the pallet. The volcanic island loomed in front of us and after a butt bruising hour on rough seas, we scrambled ashore on the black sand beach.

There is one, semi-paved road running around the outside of the island. We drove to the plantation through countless tiny villages made up of grass huts and the occasional market. It makes sense to build houses out of grass since the rainfall is around 2,500mm a year. Everything rots, so you might as well make your house out of something you can rebuild and repair without great expense.

The plantations that surround the island are made up of massively tall coconut trees with cocoa cultivated underneath. As we drove along the coast with the kids and the cargo in the back of the pick-up truck, everyone we passed waved and smiled. A bunch of kids playing soccer. Women with naked babies on their backs. Men carrying bamboo and bales on their heads. People outside huts cooking over open fires. Coconut trees and jungle everywhere.

We finally got to the plantation just as it was starting to get dark and I finally saw my new home. The teachers house/school house is brand new. I'm the first person to live in it. It's a three bedroom bungalow with a huge veranda overlooking the coastal cliffs. It has been built to catch the breezes with louvered and screened windows. The trees on the cliff in front of my house are full of bananas and papayas (but I'm not sure how to get them without falling down the cliff). The view is spectacular.

The kids gave me a tour of the garden the next day. I returned with an armful of fruit from the trees. There is a patch of pineapple, a patch of watermelon, starfruit, passionfruit, a lime tree, not to mention the ubiquitous coconuts, bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes. There is a set of stairs that leads down to a beautiful, shaded, black sand beach with translucent water and coral just off shore.

We also went to see the copra processing plant and the storerooms where the copra is dried. The family runs a supplies store nearby where you can get staples like flour, sugar, rice, tinned tuna and coca cola. Because there is so much theft, the store is behind a barricade. You have to walk up to the counter and ask for what you want. You can't wander the shop and take things off the shelf. I was introduced to everyone there so they would know I belonged to the plantation and wasn't just some lost white woman.

The local brand of tinned tuna is called “Diana”. I think it's hilarious. It feels like I've fallen victim to a very sophisticated new type of cannibal with their own processing plant. Strangely the locals don't go out and catch their own tuna (which is abundant in these waters). They all eat tinned tuna.

Arriving

I made it!!! My plane had been delayed an hour and it was pitch dark and raining buckets as I stepped off the plane at the tiny airport on the coast. An airline employee stood at the bottom of the stairs of the prop plane and handed me a very large umbrella. I found the whole family waiting for me in the shed that passes for an airport arrivals lounge. They greeted me with a lai of fresh frangipani from the island and a hug.

I had spent nearly 4 hours at Port Moresby airport waiting for my connecting plane. I got talking with a young, Papuan guy with a heavy Australian accent, wearing an electricians uniform. As the only solo woman (and conspicuously blonde in an airport where 95% of the people were locals) he seemed to have pegged me as a potential damsel in distress. While extolling the beauty of PNG, he didn't gloss over the dangers (especially for a conspicuously blonde solo woman). He told me to trust my instincts and never walk around towns alone. He gave me his card and the name of his company's rep near the town where I'll be staying and vehemently urged me to get in contact if I ever “got in trouble or felt the need to flee”. He would make sure I was taken care of. I was genuinely touched.

Of course, I'm not wandering around PNG, blonde and alone. As soon as I walked off the plane, I became part of the household and community of the family that has hired me to teach their kids. The family patriarch and owner of the plantation had been here 50 years and had married a local woman (actually, a couple of local women). My new students are a gorgeous mix of English, Papuan and German.

They checked me into a room at the resort hotel in town. A sprawling place with seven swimming pools overlooking the bay. Of course it was still pitch dark and pouring with rain as we sat in the posh dining room having dinner. It wasn't until morning when the clouds lifted and the sun came out that I finally got my first breathtaking look at the coast. Sometimes you can see the island from here, but not today. It's still a little too misty. It's a shame, because the view could really use an active volcano island floating in the azure sea to add an extra sense of danger and wonder and the feeling of being at the edge of the world.

The strange sense of foreboding seemed to lift as I partook in a lavish complimentary breakfast buffet.

The Island of No Return

After months of planning and paperwork, I'm finally on my way to PNG.

The anticipation has been killing me. I've been googling the heck out of everything associated with the island, the plantation and the nearby town. From what I gathered, the locals refer to their home as “The Island of No Return” which could mean one of two things.

A) it's so nice, once you go there, you'll never want to leave.

Or

B) watch out for the enormous volcano, the malarial mosquitoes, the treacherous ocean passage on a tiny boat and certainly beware of the two major social evils on the island (as quoted on a blog by a local islander). Beware of marijuana and sorcery.  

Time for a new chapter

I have a new job as a teacher on a copra plantation in PNG.  I'm flying there tomorrow.  Stay tuned!!!

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.

Trying our hand at ochre painting

Yesterday I set up a table outside under a tree so we could have morning tea there and do art (without making my classroom/living room look like a bomb hit it). It is Reconciliation Week so we made our own pigments out of ochre rock. It made some amazing colors. We mixed the rock dust with white paint and water and it actually stuck to the paper quite nicely. Traditionally the rock painters use kangaroo fat and blood, but I wasn't going to go that far for a school project. We traced around our hands to replicate the traditional cave art and painted them using our own pigments. Angelina put nail polish on hers. I’m not sure that’s very traditional.

Visitors from the APY Lands

We have some central aborigines from the APY Lands visiting today.  They have a huge native title area that straddles the border between Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia.  They want to set up a similar aboriginal wilderness camp on their lands two hours drive from Ayres Rock.  They have come to see how it's set up here to get some ideas.  I was quizzing them by the fire last night about their communities and their artists.  Nice folks.  They have to buck the expectations of their culture in order to get ahead.  In the aboriginal culture, what's yours also belongs to anyone else in the community who wants it and asks for it.  Everything is shared.  So there isn't much incentive to get ahead.

Dingos and bush tucker

In the last week we've had a pack of wild dingos in heat around the house. They howl for hours at night. You also hear the occasional bark, which means there are domestic dogs amongst them. Dingos can't bark. I woke up to them howling this morning. They seemed very close - I would say within 200 yards of the house, but these things can be deceptive. It's very atmospheric. I saw some dingo/mastiff crossed dogs at the aboriginal camp down the river. Mean looking things. Who would want to breed extra wild and uncontrollable traits into a mastiff?

When the dingos are around, we let Ida Dog sleep inside. She is still so tiny. The family had a dog a couple of years ago . . . . a fluffy little poodle thing . . . . that ran off with the dingo pack. They think she would be the alfa female by now, but I think they just said that so the kids wouldn't know she had been horribly torn apart by a pack of wild dogs.

I also collected my first harvest of bush tucker. Behind my kitchen window is a patch of rosella shrubs. It's like wild hibiscus. You take off the petals and dry them and make them into tea. I've got my drying near the window. If it works, I still have a huge harvest. I've tried some that the family made last year. It is very yummy.

The shark incident

The folks around here had always told me there were bull sharks in the river. I guess I wanted to go for a swim, so I chose to believe they were pulling my leg.


We went fishing on the river yesterday and Angelina (who is five years old) caught a shark!! It was as big as her. She was very proud. The family isn’t allowed to eat shark because it is a family totem (and it gives them gas, which they pragmatically take as a sign that they spiritually shouldn’t be eating it). Maybe I should adopt cabbage as my family totem.

Meeting the legends

We got a lift back from the school camp with some aboriginal tour operators who were coming to the camp for a meeting. All the aboriginal tour operators from along the river had teamed up to create an association to promote the area and cooperate with marketing.

Around the table were some of the area’s local legends. One was considered “the father of Kimberley tourism”. He was one of the “stolen generation” and was taken from his aboriginal family when he was three years old. He spent his youth working as a cowboy on one of the large cattle stations before starting a tour business that took people into the remote areas on the Kimberley long before there was anything but a few dirt tracks.

Around the table he told tales of taking one of the aboriginal elders back into his childhood homeland. The indigenous people stopped living their traditional lifestyle many years ago, but this fellow was old enough to remember his youth living the traditional hunting and gathering life. He was able to explain the mysterious squares made out of stones that were presumed to be fireplaces, but were actually the foundations for the traditional bark huts. He had also shown them gallery after enormous gallery of untouched rock paintings. Huge areas where everywhere you turned was a rock painting. Areas that are so remote and untouched now, that they are rarely (if ever) seen.

It was really an honor to sit at the table and listen to his tales of the Kimberely.  He now has an OBE.  I found that out when I googled him after he left.   Such a sweet guy and happy to talk to a lilly-white new-comer like me and answer all my odd questions.

School camp

Once a term the School of the Air has a camp where all the students come in from the distant stations to socialize and the parent and teachers get to meet, do professional development and team building.


This term the camp was in Broome at Cable Beach. A wealthy benefactor had donated the land for the camp before the real estate became so valuable. It’s right on the beach and right next to the poshest resort in Broome.

Bush kids tend to be sweet, unaffected and self reliant. They really are a lovely bunch of kids. They are also super excited to have so many people to play with, so the atmosphere is very jolly. This camp included a visit to the Crocodile Park, a visit from an Astrologer to look at the night sky and the passage of Venus and an early morning camel ride down the beach. The parents and home tutors also enjoy the company and share endless cups of tea, teaching tips and gossip.

I finally got to meet the other home tutors (or governesses which is old fashioned term that is mostly used around here). They seemed to fall into two categories. The very young girl from the city who was on an adventure into the wilds of the Outback. Or the local girls who were barely out of school and were teaching younger siblings or a family friend.

A group of seven of us governesses went out for a drink at the posh resort next door. Half of us decided that two cocktails were enough and headed home. The others went on a spree and ended up getting thrown out of a nightclub in town at 1am. I have to ask myself, what does a person have to do to get thrown out of a nightclub in a mining town?