Bad Prickles

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By the time I showed our documentary, "Two Brothers Walking" to the senior men and women at Umuwa we had been working on it for about five years. It was a time of discovery for me. I was acutely aware that I didn't have any experience of how first nations peoples see the world. I knew that interpreting what I heard and saw in terms of what I knew would filter out the most valuable insights. I was on a journey of discovery. The big question was, "How do you discover new things when being there stops it happening?"

The colonisation of Australia was as brutal as the Roman Legions sweeping Europe. Local customs and languages had to go underground to survive. Only remotes places where resources were inadequate to support an occupying force were spared. Christianising missions were a different matter, though often Christianity would undergo more changes than those being proselytized. I recorded many conversations with old ladies for instance, who in their younger days worked around the missions, cooking, spinning, crafting. Later they married and lived in shepherd huts and tended sheep or trapped dingoes for the bounty while living off the country.

My imagination had been primed for these things, having grown up on the land myself. Like all kids we were all interested in hearing stories from the olden days. We wanted to know what life was like for our parents and grandparents. There were a few standard anecdotes but we didn't hear much about their earlier life. There had been too much war, too much prejudice, too much hardship. I knew for instance that dad spoke German as a kid, but I didn't know that it resulted in some pretty poor treatment in the school playground. I knew that dairy farming was hard work and dad and his brothers resented it. What I didn't know was that it set them up in a way that they were able to pay off the mortgage on a new farm in five years. We knew about hardship, we knew about thrift and we knew about faith. We stuck pretty closely together and minded our own business.

Your first big "coming of age" as a farmers kid is learning to ride a bike. Within a short time your unsupervised world extends from a couple of hundred metres of the house and sheds to a couple of kilometers. It's a taste of freedom. It meant that the time it took to pen the milking cows' calves for the night was greatly reduced, that taking the mens' lunch down to where they were working in the big shed meant that you would get to have a cuppa with them, that you would get to sit pride of place on the chopping block with a burlap bag folded on top as a cushion, to make the intent of comfort obvious if not the reality. Having a bike meant you had more time to ride your bike, over to the cousins place, across to the gravel pit, and if your were willing to risk a walloping, down to the river during the flood. Floods are fascinating. They're so... Biblical!

But there were still some places where it was better to walk, along the sandy track through the light timber on the ridge paddock, or where there were lots of sand burr, or as we preferred to call them, bad prickles. Now you might think the idea of good prickles is an oxymoron. But growing up on a farm you accept prickles as a fact of life. Of all the prickles you will come across, whether it is bindis, or grass seeds in your socks, goat heads, triangle jacks, Bathurst Burr, prickly pear and even tiger pear to mention just a few, bad prickles are by far the worst. They designate areas where you simple don't go when you are bare foot, and even then only with extreme caution. Walking about the farm I found it so easy to drift into reverie. It was a place of discovery. If the surroundings became too familiar and failed to hold your interest there was always your inner world. What was here before us? Perhaps there are relics lying in wait to be discovered. I longed to come across a nugget of gold or even a stone axe.

We had heard stories of how the station homesteads were built with rifle windows. Does that mean there was full awareness, never talked about, that this land had belonged to someone else, that the colonials were hell bent on taking it by force? They had burnt their bridges and the lies of primitive native, and smoothing the dying pillow were just a salve for their own brutal conscience. It is still with us today and is likely to be for longer than I can tell.

Coming out of the room after watching the documentary, the old men and women came up to me one after another and offered me a handshake. Not the business handshake of the white fella in which you implicitly sized each other up, but what I call an Anangu hand shake, one that is warm and gentle, holding your hand in a way that feels more like a loving embrace, a welcome, a recognition one human being to another. It was a handshake with tears in their eyes, and that brought tears to mine. It was not just a remembrance and tribute to their early memories but fulfillment of something in mine as well.



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