Respect, guilt, disgust

In the last two weeks I have travelled the entire length of Australia north to south, Darwin to Adelaide. A grand total of 3085km through the centre of Australia. The majority of the area I have travelled through has been uninhabited desert. Uninhabited that is apart from the native aboriginal people.

The Australian attitude to aboriginals is a strange one, a mixture of respect, guilt and disgust. There is a great respect for the traditional culture of the Aborigines... indeed the majority of the tourist attractions through the red center are based on aboriginal art, sacred sites and traditions.

However Australians still feel guilty over the British colonisation of Australia that all but destroyed the native aboriginal communities. Today's Australian population seem to feel a huge collective remorse, in fact since 1998 Australia has been holding 'National Sorry Days' as an apology and reconciliation to their native inhabitants. There is also a large amount of positive discrimination and social benefits directed at the Aboriginal community.

Yet despite this respect and this guilt, there is also an undercurrent of disgust. The Aboriginals that are visible in towns and cities appear marginalized and are most often seen begging, fighting and drinking in the streets. Alice Springs, for example, has one of the highest murder rates and one of the greatest levels of alcohol consumption in the world due to its Aboriginal population. Alcohol addiction in the aboriginal community has led to strict laws and it is expected that the Northern Territory will become a dry state within the next five years.

It seems that western culture is continuing to have a negative impact upon aboriginal culture, but who are we to judge... culture is not a static ideal but peoples lives. The Aboriginal community is not a tourist attraction but a group of people with the rights and the ability to decide their own future. And as for the rest of the Australian population? I guess they have learnt to live with their contradictory feelings.

But after my experience of being identified and judged on my skin colour in Indonesia it feels very strange. I thought I had learnt a new level of tolerance, but here I am again looking at a group of people identifiable by their appearance and judging them and the society the live in and my feelings of respect, guilt and disgust seem to be much harder to reconcile.

Life through a lense

I've always been a reluctant photographer, preferring to get copies of other peoples pics than to take my own. This reluctance is not (just) a result of laziness, but more a slight embarrassment - the crassness of capturing a moment & sealing it in a little box for eternity.

This photophobia reached its peak this week at Ularu (no pun intended). I had travelled for days to the centre of the Australian continent to see the worlds largest rock. And so had hundreds of other people. Hundreds of people from hundreds of countries are bussed in each day to photograph sunset, to photograph sunrise, to photograph the worlds most photographed rock.
I found this faintly embarrassing and fully annoying. The rock is beautiful & all that, but its beauty felt sullied by the hoards of people who would only look at it through a view finder. It felt as though each tourist, each camera stole a little bit of beauty from the rock. I began to resent the rock in the way I resent new years eve - the syndrome of being forced to do something (have fun / see beauty) at a certain time just because everyone else around you does.

So I've seen Ularu & I have that picture in my memory, but I don't have pictures of it to show you, instead here are pics of some other beautiful places I've visited that you wont find on an Athena poster or on the front cover of the Lonely Planet.

Mudsely beach, UK

Angel Island, Indonesia

Farmhouse, Madagascar

Mount Connor, Australia (about 60km from Ularu)

Indonesia's far south

The Lonely Planet states that Darwins proximity to Asia can "make it feel as though it is indeed Indonesia's far south". No. There is little, if anything here that reminds me of Indonesia.

The vast landscapes & huge skies of the Australian Northern Territory are the very opposite of Indonesia's volcanic & mountainous terrain. You can easily see through the thin tree trunks & low brush which is controlled by man-made bush fires (if only Indonesia could pre-empt & manage their natural disasters). Whereas in Indonesia you could rarely see 10m in any direction due to dense undergrowth, mountians or trees.


So Australia is not like Indonesia. Good, that's why I came here! The people are friendly, travel arrangements are easy & I have already fulfilled one of the objectives of the trip... I am once again the proud owner of a pair of pointy stiletoe shoes!

Just me (and the hobbits)

It's my last few hours in Indonesia. Zoe has returned to Flores & I am alone again as I will be for the next three months. It's an intimidating thought, but all the same I'm looking forward to a new challenge & a new country.

It'll be strange moving from the worlds largest archipelago to the only country whose land mass is so great it forms a continent. In Indonesia I often travelled between islands by boat & it will be a marked difference to travel across land - across distances so great and so empty I can't begin to imagine what it will be like.

But I am expecting some things to be familiar. Flores is the same side of the Wallace Line as Oz so some of the flora and fauna will be the same. There is also new research suggesting that the Australian Aborigines first came from Eastern Indonesia (check out the Flores hobbit), many thousands of years before I ever thought of making the journey.

So tomorrow I will arrive in another adventure. I hope that this one will be a little easier than the last, but I also hope that I learn & experience just as much.

Blondy does Oz

My time in Indonesia is drawing to a close. I have a ticket to Australia booked for next week, but more significantly I have a ticket booked back to the UK.

I still wont be home until October, but up until now I have only had a one-way ticket. I hadn't realised how unsetteling it was not to know when I would be coming home, but it feels nice to know when exactly I will be coming back to Blighty - even if it is in the middle of winter.

But in the meanwhile it's all about Australia. I've been trying to culturally prepare: I've been drinking lots of beer; I took a surfing lesson; and I dyed my hair blond(er).

This latter attempt at cultural adaption didn't go quite as planned. Of course I was already blond (definatley not 'mousy'... possibly 'dirty blond' if you wanna be picky), but I had some roots showing & thought that a hairdresser in Bali may be able to help. They helped by bleaching my hair so much it turned orange!

It's washing out a little now, but it's still quite extreme. But I guess as I wont be working for the next four months I can take advantage & settle into life as a typical ozzie blond!