Setting off

I set off for my new job, in X.  X is an Australian Aboriginal community.   I'd worked in one such place before, in fact a place populated by the same "tribe". 

The drive down from the north was quite pleasant if a bit long.  The highway runs through suburbs and industrial areas.  It  loses lanes as it passes into the moth-eaten, ratty kind of quasi-developed, quasi-natural spaces -- outer fringes of cities on the margins of nearly unpopulated vastnesses. I suppose Russia and Africa also have such places.  Cheap land on the edge of emptiness is the place for making bulk industrial goods, and so there they were--spotted along the road here and there in between long stretches of weeds and woods--a bitumen plant, a tile factory, a brickworks.  The forest takes over, and as you go south, the trees get smaller, and fewer, giving way to a figure/ground switch: instead of trees covering the land, as you go south a grassland dotted with trees takes over.    This is the savannah.  It shares animals with the desert, yet huge floods come every year.  Termite mounds stick up out of the grass.  You wouldn't want to get stranded here.  Not that it's a desert.  There are lots of big lizards, kangaroos, large birds.   Big "saltwater" crocodiles lurk in the many of the rivers.  They are spreading through the country.  Once hunting stopped, they began to show up in places that no living men had seen them.  Unexpected croc eats unsuspecting swimmer happens every year. 

After a few weeks

The big 4wd assigned to me has become a protective capsule of metal and glass with which I navigate the harsh environment.  Not the bush.  The community.   When the flies are at their horrible thickest, I move unscathed.  The community is a spectacle of broadcast rubbish, strewn everywhere in the people's yards, slathers of dogs wandering around scratching, chasing each other, people's beds put outside their burnt-out looking houses, one outside bed with an electric fan set up beside it.   Another house--once new, now a wreck--has arranged a wire leading out across the road to a double bed with nightstand and television. 

 We don't go out at night: there is no where to go, as we haven't made any acquaintances here amongst the non-aboriginal people, save with the neighbors right nearby, and with a teacher, an former resident of Europe who has lived in Aboriginal country for many years.  In the meantime, the Aboriginal people are who we wave to when on the road, and who we meet in school, for teaching, or as teaching colleagues. 

J., the teacher, maintains a flat in a European capital.  He has been on hunting parties for dugong, eaten all sorts of bush meats, and has not a shred of interest in these sorts of things any more.  He's probably amongst the very most sophisticated people I've ever met; he loves it here.

Every day is a challenge, he says.  At one Australian university, they told him, why not get a Ph.D. become a lecturer, senior lecturer, etc.  He thought, no, how boring...

Last night, after running around Y. all day looking for students, signing up new students, my wife went to bed, and I lay down on the lounge and fell asleep. Around 10:30 I woke up to the sounds of music coming over from the basketball court.  It was the band boys.  I walked over.  M., who sometimes played in local well known bands, and now plays with his friends whenever he can, was working out on lead guitar, running his long melodic lines over, under and around the vocals and against the drum and bass.  The bassman was way in the back of the group.  I didn't see him for a while.  I went back to get my wife up and out of bed, but she wouldn't come, she couldn't see well at a distance anyway....she had taken her contacts out.  I went back out to the band scene. They were laying down chicken clucking rhythm guitar over and under some obscure lyrics--language or English I couldn't tell and it didn't matter.  Kids were writhing to the music, and one old man with a white beard was just grooving out.  He came over and invited me to get dancing too, by dancing right in front of me.  I did, and got down into kungfu Eskimo dancing and stayed down. The old man tried and backed off right away....he had his own style anyway, he told me with his eyes.

 Waterhole

It's a couple weeks later. We've been out driving around in the bush looking for animals.  We've seen some interesting birds, including some brolgas, some tens of kilometers down the road on a station dam. 

Teachers told us about another waterhole --W. waterhole--out that way.  Lots of these teachers had been out there.  It was on a road marked by a sign "Aboriginal Land: Do Not Enter".  Not a problem, we were told.  We started down the road, planning to stop at an Aboriginal elder's place on the way to get his permission to go down that road.   As it happened, no one was there...Just hard to find him home, it seemed.  We went on down the road.  Pretty soon we saw a BIG truck coming towards us, with a ute preceding.  The ute went past us,