Ngukurr blog: 26 October 2005 Teachers who were there are marvelling at an experience the other week, taking 20 kids out camping. They came upon a bunch of wild horses. They stopped the Toyota Troopie, the kids piled out, the brumbies snorted and took off, but not before the kids, barefoot, caught up with the slowest, a foal. They hunting-encircled and cut it off, caught it, played with it, petted it... and then sent it off on its way again. In conversations I am conscious of touching the fringe of another world here, though disconcertingly it is not just a touch between spheres or circles... We think we encircle them, they in many ways encircle us. There is a relief teacher here, Hazel, who is my daughter... in the way of classificatory kinship systems. She calls me apunini; it is proper for me to call her biganini... it's not an easy adjustment in terms of address of an elder in the local community. Hazel tells me stories about rough treatment when a child and living in the dormitories of the mission, when this was a mission. But when I say, while asking her about her views on Christianity and traditional belief and wanting to appear open-minded, that I am not a Christian, Hazel looks at me quite askance, more like my actual mother or my mother's late Baptist sister. I met another mother of mine here, aged 12 or so, this week. Simon the art teacher is my father. Don't take no notice of me, obey your uncle he says. Everybody is something to each other. Bindi has the biggest problems in class with those students who are her daughters, least problems with those who are her daughters-in-law - though that relationship is supposed to be the most negative in the extended kinship system cosmos. It is a severe test, meeting so many new people daily (and myself always having had difficulty putting names to faces) recalling instantly what your relationship is with each person. I meet Ruth, my sister, for the first time, in the dark, out walking, and fortunately put enough together, quickly enough, to greet her properly when meet her in daylight at the clinic... I am to see her at the clinic next week when she is back from leave, to get from her some bush medicine for foot arthritis, something we also share. Eddie the human resources chief at the Yugul Mangi local council says he is my brother, my baba... but my daughter Hazel frowns at that, because he is her baba. "Ah," I say to Hazel, "Maybe he just wants Ev as his bunji!" Hazel laughs. Bunji is the word for wife. In this extended kinship system, my brother calls my wife wife too. Ewan, the smarty pants of senior boys, whom I have met in the dark at the gig last week, yesterday tells me his name is Scot, (Wot yo nem? Mein nem Scot.) then laughs at my confusion. Today he says his name is Gordon, "another Scot name like Ewan". So, to play along, I say of the boys around in the 'testing gaggle' - "thispela King Charles" [howls of laughter]; this one King James; this one King George. Hoots of laughter, then one of them drops his Kriol accent, puts on a plummy English accent and points down at the head of a very small boy and says "This Lord Farquhar" and the boy who says that takes the names-game trick for today as we all fall about shrieking. Only later do younger and wiser people tell me that Lord Farquhar is a Shrek character. Compete intellectually at your own risk if you come here, but don't expect the game to stay in one place. We are hunters out here, necessarily hyperactive, hyperalert, shifting attention, vulnerable, sensitive. We figure the issue, we move on... I wonder if there are any Aboriginal people playing Sudoko? I very much doubt it! They have the wit, the speed, the understanding of enough of our waitpela business to know they themselves are at the centre of the universe... except... except — that boy is wearing a shirt inscribed "8 mile eminem" and stands before me and does a rap number for me, imitating, by heart, not inventing, while the one with the Snoopp Dogg T-shirt is putting his rap tape on the player in the corner of the art room where I am working on building this painting storage thing for the Art Centre... School is closed for the day, there is no water and the power has been off until just a while ago. I have been lent a key and have let this group come in to help me... with as strong admonitions to good conduct as you can address to brothers, uncles, cousins. The business of using the bandsaw to cut pvc pipe and of building something that looks like a cross between the Olgas and church organ pipes (for storing rolled canvasses) is only so engaging - while, outside there, the day is hot and full of brumbies. |