Had something of a revelation on the plane today. In terms of my relationship to this, my sleeping blog, it was significant. To significant others in cyberspace it may be of some momentary gratification. To the person on the street or the course of world history, it will not register at all.

It is this: As I have been too busy and involved in life to comment it on it here, and this site has become a memorial to the year that was, rather than finding a few more hours a week to transcribe or create material that could be ‘blog’ conent, instead I can offer a poor alternative- I will post the bits of relevant detritus produced for other exciting causes on here.

The most recent piece of excitement has been that I was awarded a grant to research Northern Territory History. I’m totally stoked to be on the trail of a bunch of old stirrers and cattlemen. This is from my application:

Title: From Walk-Off to Handover- helpers and wayfarers recount their experiences of the Wave Hill Walk-Off

Summary: The project aim is to compile a collection of interviews of supporters and observers of events in the Wave Hill Welfare Settlement (Kalkaringi) locality in the years 1966 -1977.

Research Subject: By examining the experiences, motivations and reflections of supporters and observers of the industrial action and Land Rights protest commonly known as the Wave Hill Walk Off, a basis from which to explore larger issues will be formed. These issues include:

• the political response to the occupation of Wattie Creek as an early administrative template for the subsequent ‘welfare era’ of Indigenous policy;
• the Walk-Off as a site of the current model of complex inter-relationships between Indigenous people and their ‘post-missionary‘- era assisting agents
• contrasting community responses to the Walk-off as a resource for understanding social attitudes towards Indigenous self-determination and the implications of those attitudes for national identity.

Interviewees:

• Kerry Gibbs, son of George Gibbs (dec), committed Union activist and Gurindji supporter
• Robert Wesley Smith (Murramulla Cattle Co. Employee)
• Dorothy Singh, Nurse at Wave Hill Station, circa 1960-65
• Allan Thorpe, shopkeeper at Kalkaringi, 1970-75
• Hannah Middleton, Gurindji supporter, anthropologist
• Peter Murphy, ABC Journalist
• Lyn Riddett, Gurindji supporter, academic
• Jan Richards, widow of Stan Davey (dec), Indigenous rights activist

• Bill Jeffrey and/or Sue Jeffrey, Welfare officer at Kalkaringi, 1966

All dove- tailling nicely with the book I hope to be writing again by this time next year: more of that later.

Just returned from an amazing week. The most amazing of my Link-Up reunions so far. A great reminder why I stick through all the mutinous madness of my workplace, to help deliver some connection, family, culture, love and acceptance to those who need it. A wild story I hope to tell some time. Damn study and my Master’s proposal have eaten my blogging time this year.

A lot has been happening away from the pixellated parameters of thispage. I am in a new house with a new car, new bicycle, and newly returned love interest. Sorry, partner, girlfriend, other half, kungka.

I’m in the early stages of an Advanced Diploma in Process-Oriented Therapy in Sydney.

I’m also in the advanced stages of work-induced madness. I suspect burnout is on its almost inevitable way.  I am now the longest-serving member of the staff, except for the lady I call ‘the big boss’.  My immediate supervisor, the only person I really have enjoyed working with, has resigned and left last week. She couldn’t take any more of the profligate incompetence and petty malevolence, or didn’t want to.

This is not the post to catalogue all the woes of my workplace- just the last one, which made me laugh a lot, until I realised when I got home how much it hurt and angered me.  There hasn’t been a peep about advertising for my supervisor’s job, so i was surprised to see an application for it on the printer yesterday. Less surprised to hear later that the applicant (there will be only one, I am sure) was a close relative of my manager.  I am not even sure if I would have applied, had i been given the chance. I am sure though that with my twelve months experience I would have been better qualifiedfor the job than any applicants we are likely to attract. This decision and others makes me wonder if the management resent their reliance on ‘outsiders’, particularly non-indigenous ones. At any rate, they seem to be very busily occupied in stripping away any normally- accruing reasons why I would want to continue working for them.

Even a great job can be turned into a nightmare with the right management.

My folly of the past year or more has paid off. The laborious essay has been accepted for publication. Perseverance is the passport to success it seems, and another cliche- making an impression on an editor really works. I dragged myself to a  gathering of local word-fans at the local drab bunker known as the Todd Tavern. I went by myself, wrapped in acute solitary discomfort, after five days on the road and a six hour special down the Stuart Highway from Tennant Creek that afternoon- with one purpose on my mind. I wanted to buttonhole the editor of an admirable journal about my previous rejection.  I wanted feedback, and to let her know that what was rejected had been re-written and was still up for grabs. It seems it paid off.

Publication expected in December 2009. My only other literary goal for the year is to get an NT History Grant to interview some more of the witnesses, stirrers and hangers-on of the Wave Hill Walk-off. Applications due soon. Not enough time or headspace to write anything for this year’s NT literary awards.  I dream of bigger, deeper more intricate immersions when my job finally sprials from copious stress and incredulity into a hasty exit without regret.

The good thing about life is that as long as it goes on, it always provides chances to get better at it. Sometimes my own optimism amazes me, but there you have it.

A coupe of weeks ago I was talking with my Bro about the disappointments of interacting with a great chunk of the population these days. No doubt everybody has their quirks and charms, but these are hard to spot among the legions of people around who share a single trait- they can’t bloody listen. You know the conversations where you quickly realise that your new friend has no interest in you? Where they show a remarkable fascination in their own intricacies to the point where their audience is completely excluded from their awareness? Where, in a milder form, if they should ever make some enquiry of you, they promptly forget to listen to the answer? I’ve had dozens of encounters with this clan over the years. Generally the more self-obsessed they are the less I want to do with them.

For long-suffering ‘considerates’ like me, old-fashioned types who were bought up to be polite, these people can reap a heavy, boring toll. I’ve actually come to think that the burden is disproportionate- the mirror gazers like those I’ve described seek the rest of us out on purpose, because we indulge them by giving them their attention. It’s a double bind of course- the more used you are to initiating and perpetuating interaction through curiosity, the less likely it is that you will ever be able to do anything but listen to the wisdom of your new-found friends as they expound upon themselves. Your querulous interjections become fewer and fewer as their self assurance and focus is enhanced by the persistence of your presence.

I work with a guy like this, and on Monday we had a two hour drive together.

We were about twenty minutes into the trip and I was listening to his loud self-propelled waffle about his house, or car, or computer or something. He’d just ignored whatever I had tried to throw into the bottomless maw of his self-fascination. At that moment a small freedom fighter reared up at the back of my mind. This was going to be Process Work at its most dirty, desperate, street fighting-survivalist level. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would work. ‘What is this guy doing that shits me to tears?’ I asked myself. ‘Well let’s try it on.’ I waited until a pause in X’s monologue and launched into what I had tried to say before he had interrupted me. As I’m a bit short of Castro-esque oratory skills- because I’ve never given myself enough opportunities to practice, no doubt- after a minute a pause arose in my speech and X launched himself into the gap again. Then he paused, and I did something I’ve probably never done in my life. I completely ignored everything he had just said and continued on exactly from where I had been interrupted last. I sensed some surprise in the passenger seat and barreled on. This went on for quite a while:

X: Blah, blah, blah.

Me: A, B, C, D…..

X: Blah, blah, blah.

Me: …….E, F, G, H, J…

X: Blah, blah, blah.

Me: …..K, L, M……’

It was the conversational equivalent to driving a Hummer when you’re used to having a beetle: pretty good fun really! I like it.

It doesn’t mean that I want to become bosom buddies with these types suddenly, but co-existence just got a lot easier. Four days later X and I had to do the same trip in reverse. Then it became my turn to be silently shocked in the passenger seat. He asked me a question!

PS. X is an individual, not the representation above. He’s not QUITE that bad

Jeju-Do. The holiday-from-a-holiday started quite well. The eyes of four car rental company women at the airport all lit up at once as they saw a bonafide international tourist to practice their English on. They nominated the one with the best English to engage us in polite nodding, tentative exchanges and uncomfortable silences. Twenty minutes later a woman driving a brand new Daewoo sedan roared in to the pick up zone and had us deposited in the middle of the carpark to fill in paperwork about .8 of a second later.

After a consultation with the Korean-speaking GPS system and a small prayer we were away, driving out of Jeju city on a road promising metropolitan escape. Jeju is the sub-tropical ‘honeymoon island’ of South Koreans. It is five hundred kilometres south of Seoul, a volcanic extrusion seventy kilometres wide by thirty long. It was the middle of winter, so I wasn’t expecting to be taking on Korea’s only coral reef, but we were looking forward to temperatures 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the mainland. ‘Warmer, wetter and windier’, I said as we left Gimpo Airport. Technically my forecast was correct on all three counts, but it didn’t prepare me at all for what we fought for the first 24 hours of our island getaway.

Ten minutes from the airport it began to snow on us, and very quickly we were one of a handful of cars heading up hill out of town. We were on a road that would take us through the mountainous country of the island’s centre. We passed a big sign flashing a nice collection of Korea’s unique letters at us. In minutes, the road and everything in sight was covered in snow, including most of the many cars inching the other way from within the blizzard towards the city. It got dark. The road was treacherous, and we were still at low altitude.

We had a failure of nerves and did a U-turn into the traffic jam slowly heading the other way. We formed a strategy of heading for lower ground, getting onto a road that headed across the island instead of over its volcanic top. Thus began a long crawl in bumper to bumper traffic. It seemed rather curious to me that everyone was heading into town on a Friday night in such numbers. Although it was snowy I couldn’t work out why we were all moving slower than a walk. Part of my confusion evaporated when we noticed the slightly surreal sight of the cars and even large trucks around us sliding around sideways at two kilometres an hour, fishtailing like half-frozen eels on the spot.

It was relatively easy to get onto another road. Unfortunately though the blizzard was completely unconcerned with altitudinal issues. I started allowing new associations in my mind: things like ‘tropical snowstorm.’ With no indication if this was a once in a century event or an average Friday night on Jeju, we committed to the lonely business of getting ourselves to the other side of the island. If we stopped, as a few other cars were doing, it was going to be a long and very cold night. I wondered what the next day would bring. Waking in a snow cave? If we made it across, would we ever get back in time for a plane on a couple of days? Was there going to be a hotel to take us in if we made it through?

The snow was thick and heavy, unceasingly rushing into our visual field. It looked like a snowstorm, a sea of white particles forming in the blackness, rushing towards and around us and away. The windscreen wipers were doing their job well, but were ridiculously thick, black creations that were impossible see past as they swept back and forwards in front of us. Keeping my eyes on the road was a constant battle. I turned on the hazard lights and found some Mozart on the radio to help relax my jangled nerves. Everything was going pretty well until we crept up behind a car travelling a little slower than us and I made a jab at the hyper-sensitive brakes. Suddenly we began swerving elegantly all over our double lanes. To the left, to the right…. improvisational jazz would have nailed how I was feeling more accurately, but it was a great moment for classical music as we swept casually from side to side in the night, and ended with a little backward drift before pulling to a stop with our nose touching the concrete axle-killers at the edge of the road.

It turned out that the island’s shaman- guardians were on our side. Their smiling stone faces and beehive cairns of rock welcomed us just about everywhere we went over the next two days, including the Eros Museum hidden in a soccer stadium. It was all about stone-walled manadarin orchards, female deep-diving seafood harvesters and making it back to the airport in time.  The place is tourism paradise- but go in summer.

The first time I saw it on one of my visits to the big smoke I thought they were just the victims of extreme bad taste combined with poverty. There were three girls walking through Brunswick Melbourne like evictees of a suddenly terminated op-shop party. They were drifting along the footpath in nothing much but light, gaudy and short polyester frocks. There were thongs or flipflops on their feet and outsized blowfly sunglasses covering their foreheads. Their hair was thoroughly ‘done’, not into any style in particular, but rather like a team of hairdressers working at cross-purposes had all contributed to some process that had also been terminated in mid-flight. The combination of gaudy, cheap apparel and overdone accessories screamed of vapidity and materialistic excess.

Why would people with money dress so ‘down’ though? What was going on? On a Melbourne tram I had just had my seedy induction to the sham-glam, celebrity- slut LOOK that I now recognise as de rigeur. Often having my head mostly in fairly obscure places, like current affairs or adventure books, I am still none the wiser about the name of this fashion, but from my incidental sightings I have started joining a few dots, and the hazy picture I am forming from my desert outpost does not endear me at all. It looked ugly, cheap and accidental, but over time I realised it was calculated and symptomatic of a raft of trends going on mostly over my Outback horizon. 

I started seeing look-alikes all over the place. I saw how some kid with a name like ‘Corey’ got a moment of fame for some excess of self indulgence. He threw a party which was attended by several hundred facebook friends while his parents were away and half destroyed the house. Repentance is not part of the new way. Corey’s contribution to public discourse was a huge repository of smart arse ‘up yours’ one-liners, and I think he found his place on reality television. Or perhaps the other obnoxious turkey-slappers and waxheads who congregate now in our loungerooms reminded me of him and I have them mixed up.

Eighteen months after my first exposure to celeb-slut I have recognised and identified their male counter-parts in the field: the matching ‘Ken’s’ for the ‘Barbie’s.’ I don’t know what level of ‘work’ on one’s appearance is condoned for the boys, but I suspect it is rather high. Narcism, supported by capitalism, has triumphed over homophobia. The hair is the same as the girls, except shorter. I have cottoned on to the fact that for the boys, working out at the gym is part of the package, and I suspect that the shaving of body hair is ‘cool’ for both sexes. Think of a pack of triangular pre-pubescent bodybuilders named Dwayne or Blake with toilet brush hair-does walking through customs at the Bali Airport. Lucky Indonesia.

.

Apart from being ugly, the party-tramp look is made for the young. It attempts to convey an ‘I’ve got no interests or responsibilities except for those facilitated by my credit card’ attitude that can only be pulled off by those under the age of nineteen with any plausibility. Unfortunately there are some people who don’t recognise this-it is mildly traumatic to see a woman in her mid thirties debasing herself trying to affect ‘celeb-slut’ with kids in tow; even Victoria Beckham looks like she’s stepped onto the wrong set when photographed with her children. The ‘look’ is predicated on a self without constraints, or with total disregard for those that may exist. The concept of parenthood is completely contradictory to this, unless the parent is recast as a type of ringleader, adept at indulging the worst of their children’s impulses as well as their own.

Needless to say, with ‘the look’ comes the behaviour. Poor behaviour is condoned and rewarded. ‘Celeb-slut’ has taken the ‘boys will be boys’ sentiment across genders and to new heights, not least when Prince William borrowed a military helicopter to visit his girlfriend, earning little more than  a ‘tut-tut’ in the press. Generation X, of which I am a tail-ender, at least had some haphazard creative outcomes to show for all our supposed nihilism and alienation. Some of those included the first signals of what was to come. Now Paris ‘celeb-slut’ Paragon- Hilton is some kind of spokes-piece for the legions of wanna-be’s. She stands for nothing, except perhaps a good time, though she has an inkling of self-awareness, which I like on anyone, however obnoxious they may be. Her contribution to the US presidential contest was right on the money. ‘I am not from the olden days, and I am not promising change. I’m just hot.’

Paris is a leader of her new generation. She may not have anything to say, but it may behove us to listen.

A good opportunity arose to practise PW today. After yum-cha in the Darwin mall with my buddies I had some errands to do and said I wanted to get a bus home from town to mix with ‘the real Darwin’. When I fronted up at the bus interchange I decided to get a ticket at the office because I didn’t have the right change. I walked up to the counter and the innocuous-seeming bus man was about to help me out. Then a guy came in shouting, waving his fists and abusing and threatening him behind his big perspex window. That fellow was wild, stalking round like a rooster, really angry because his wife had just been assaulted outside before my arrival. He had appealed to the ‘WANKER’ behind the counter to call the police, but the ‘WANKER’ had refused, which was completely ‘F____N PISSWEAK’. He was really agitated about his wife’s wellbeing because she’d had a stroke a few weeks earlier. He wasn’t a huge guy physically, but he was wiry, looked strong, and was so fired up and aggro that he was quite intimidating. The guy behind the counter did very little except stand back and kept quietly repeating that assistance was on its way. A couple of bus drivers came in and intervened, with one of them (who was really big) defending his mate. All this time this guy was standing right next to me and screaming, I made a few comments and he offered to buy me a ticket- not out of any kindness to me but because he was flush and nobody should give the bus-company scum a penny.

As it was going on I was grappling with a few thoughts about how to de-escalate the situation while feeling a bit freaked by the hostility around me. Eventually the fella left the room and I bought my ticket. The bus man was obviously shaken. I made some empathic remarks to him, and to the cranky man with his missus as well before I got on the bus. As it pulled out I saw the bus security heavies pointing out the troublemaker. Round about then I started wishing that I hadn’t got on the bus and had stuck around to try and facilitate the situation further. It was bittersweet. I imagine it was kind of useful while in the office to maintain some semblance of normalcy, to nod and agree with both sides of the barney without running out screaming OR coming in heavily on one side or the other. About one minute after I got my ticket I realised what I could have done, if it all happened again.

What came to me before the bus pulled out was how aware I was of the cranky man’s power. I was pretty rattled by him, even as I was quite calm because he was being very rational and directed and clear; clearly not targeting me with his fury. If it all happened again, or even a situation like it, I’d draw the guy’s attention to his power. I’d tell him he was quite awesome and full on, and even let him know that I was getting a bit spooked by him and wouldn’t be surprised if the bus man was feeling a bit nervous or scared as well. Maybe I’d tell him his wife was lucky to have such a fierce advocate and supporter. In a funny way, that would be trusting my own reaction and supporting what this guy was doing- even though from a limited perspective he looked like the ‘cause’ of ‘the problem’. I had a bad feeling that was how his uniformed ‘assistance’ was going to deal with the situation. Not that he would have helped his case by shaking his fist and giving them the bird as the Number 10 to Casuarina pulled out.

Post Script- I take solace from the ever-shortening gap between the stuff going on in the heat of the moment- the ‘hotspot’ in PW parlance- the internal processing- finding ‘process structure’ and tracking your own signals, and coming up with some clue about where the situation wants to go. The fact that the delay time keeps slowly shrinking until one day you are acting in concert with your understanding as things are unfolding is the only indication I have that I’m learning. Progress is slow, and I’m coming to accept that it can only be minimally aided by strenuous right-brained effort.     

The interstate wage-slaves are emptying out of town as the desert dwellers fill it, in search of fairy lights and Coles picnic platters and trike toys for their nephews and grandkids.

I’ve got a few more days in the desert summer, mostly hiding in an airconditioned office-tomb, then busting a move to the deep north. A week of tropical monsoon and beautiful bubbling fresh water, glowing pandanus nuts, frangipanis, fish and other things i miss about the old home at the other end of the track.

Than as the year turns I’ll jump into another alum cigar that will deposit me into the ice-crusted depths of a Korean winter. The open arms of my lovely Trang will compensate for the ‘yellow-dust’ blowing on Siberian winds from China and freezing in our lungs. It’s a phenomenological fruit salad of a holiday, which must be half the point. Scorched blue-sky outposted desert to unending cloud banks dumping off the lip of the Arafura and on to the alien, human hustle and tumult of concreted, icy Asia where our year started. Bring it on.

Dear Friends

I want you to know I have been totally tuned in to this conversation emotionally and mentally and feeling much for all of us. Ow ow ow. I apologise if I have said anything hurtful to anyone.

I too find myself in a very difficult place. I appreciate what XXXX  has said about the ‘quality’ of our conversation but I am saddened by it more than encouraged. There seems to be a strong ‘our way or the highway’ role around. I think that my self-chosen peripheral position in relation to the OZ/NZ PW scene (living in the NT, having enrolled and now deferred from the Portland Dip program)- I feel very susceptible to the low dream floating around in the last week around factionalism and one-sided loyalties. I am fearful that to be in Australia and to study through an overseas IAPOP-endorsed body (OR a non-IAPOP endorsed but PW-related school like XXXX’s) may mean being pushed away from the ANZPOP student community.

It is very important to me as a former ANZPOP student and someone deeply committed to this part of the world that I feel some acceptance and congress with others attempting to ‘Process- Work’ in the Oz community (IAPOP accredited or not). What confidence, skills and congruence I have as a person has largely come from the teaching, therapy and workshops in Oz organised and/or taught by the ANZPOP faculty, and the experiences and acceptance shared with students and other w/shop participants. I am filled with the greatest respect, indebtedness and gratitude to the ANZPOP faculty. The old cliche- but I stand on the shoulders of giants.

I don’t know if my next study steps will be to recontinue with PWI or apply to ANZPOP or PPI for admission, but I feel as if I chose anything other than the ANZPOP program, that will be seen as a rejection and put down by people in the ANZPOP community. Yet we all have differing needs and circumstances. Of course I have some rank as a student, bestowing some kind of personal endorsement and faith in this school or that school by enrolling, but at the end of the day, isn’t it the more numbers and PW’ers at ALL schools the better?

After following the string and talking with a couple of student mates, I think this is also worth saying- I would not see Pathways Institute study as any kind of substitute or replacement for IAPOP-endorsed study.

I also feel grateful for the opportunity to be heard, and a caring, optimistic hopefulness as we join somewhat through our differences yet again. Hoping everyone can join and celebrate with whatever type of ‘community’ they chose in the coming weeks

Love to all,

charlie