day sixty - stranded

4th April 2011 - 11:40pm


We're stuck. No kidding.

This wet season (summer) has been the wettest on record. Well, at least for a long time anyway. Since I've been here it's rained probably every second day. But the last fortnight has been shocking - rain every afternoon. And when it rains here, it BUCKETS down. I've never seen anything like it. I'll never complain again about the rain in Tassie. Although admittedly, it's still 30oC every day. The plus side of the rain is that everything here is amazingly green. The bush over our back fence is the most beautiful bright green I've ever seen. But the negative side is that the roads can't handle it.

The roads here are made of some kind of bright orange stuff. None of this cement and concrete stuff like at home. The grader is meant to make the road into a convex type shape, with 'drains' along the side that then have offshoots into the bush to drain the water off. But when the rain buckets down, the whole thing turns to mud, and the grading really makes no difference at all. The result is the road to the airport being closed, and the road to the barge landing is also closed. So no way out.

But also no way in. The barge is our method of getting groceries into the local shop, and the only way to feed the community. The shop is pretty small, so within a few weeks, the shop could run out of food. It's also the only way in for fuel. The fuel is obviously used for cars, although the community is pretty small, so you could probably walk everywhere you needed to. The major issue is that we're running low on fuel for the grader and digger, which are our only ways of improving the road. And we only have enough fuel to provide electricity for the community for another week. So, it's kinda drastic. And given Ben's job, the poor darling has to deal with the whole lot, including everyone in the community whinging to him about it...

But things should be ok. Ben's got 40 tonnes of rocks coming in on Tuesday, so hopefully that will be enough to improve the road for a few kilometres so the fuel and food can get in. And hopefully there'll be some assistance after that as well. Stay tuned, and in the mean time, check out the YouTube video and photos...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtqgD6WZqI

day sixty - the indigenous funeral

4th April 2011 - 11:15pm

Well, what a couple of culturally amazing weeks. Obviously it's not a happy time for the families, but we've spent the last few weeks in the midst of funerals galore. There have been at least three in the community, and from a community of only 800 people, that's a sizeable number. Although I guess they say that things come in threes...

One of the funerals was next door to our house, so we got the whole experience. We were told that our neighbours mother had passed away on the Saturday, and that the funeral is usually held at the house of one of the deceased person's children. Things were fairly quiet over the weekend though, because they had to finish the funeral down the road before they started the one here. The same people go to a lot of funerals, so only one can happen at a time. But when it had started, we couldn't miss it. Family started to arrive on the weekend, so the already full house now had three tents on the balcony, and there would have been at least 50 people staying there, I'd say. The body arrived at the house over the weekend too, and that's when things started.

The body was in some kind of coffin, and a couple of ladies started the wailing. They were throwing themselves forwards. Although I guess it was what I should have expected after seeing similar things on movies and documentaries, it still surprised me. I'm still not sure if they do it because they're upset, or it's a way of expressing themselves like dance and music. Then the music started. The family were all outside the front of the house, the women seated under the tree in a semi-circle, and the men in another semi-circle facing the driveway, away from the house. All of a sudden (well to me it was anyway), one of the men would start playing the clap sticks, and another would chime in with the didgeridoo. Then a group of men, including some teenage boys, started dancing. They jumped forward, holding and waving leaves and chanting. I don't really know how else to describe it, but every time I heard them sing, it would remind me of Yothu Yindi's song 'Treaty'. They were making different movements, I assume representing different animals or spirits, and were all completely in time. After playing in the pipe band for years, and having learnt that it takes years to perfect the memory that certain musical sounds from the bagpipes relate to certain beats and spins for me on the tenor drum, I had no idea how they did it. It was like they just knew what each other was going to do, without it being completely choreographed. It was absolutely incredible.

The singing and music went on for days. As a general rule, the local indigenous people don't get up until around 10am, but don't go to bed until the wee hours of the morning. So this meant that their music started at around lunch time, but didn't stop until they went to bed at around 2 or 3am. Every single night for the week. What an incredible demonstration of love for their deceased relative. I know that for us, we're exhausted after a 1 hour funeral.

The body left the house the next Saturday for the burial in a nearby outstation. They placed the body in a 4WD, again with the women wailing. The 4WD drove off with its horn tooting the whole way to the outstation. Ben said that often they drive around the town with the horn going to signal that someone has died, and it seems as though they do the same thing when the body leaves as well.

After the body had left, they performed a smoking ceremony. They lit some branches, the same ones they were dancing with, and waved them in any place that the body had been. Throughout the house, inside the car, all around the house. Ben said they would also have performed the ceremony in the shop or anywhere else in the community if the person had been in there recently.

And then it was all over. Until the next funeral down the road a few days later...