February, 2011

But the thing about the two ladies is that they weren’t two resident botanists! No, they were just two ladies that happened to know a hell of a lot about plants in the region. And of course what is happening now with all this assimilationist push that is going on – the Intervention, Growth Towns, the Shires – you name it – is that a lot of that knowledge is gradually just fading away. Children are spending less and less time out in the bush with their grandmothers and mothers, learning all this. What grows where and when, what can you eat and what can’t you eat.

I’d only just purchased a brand new bloody Valiant Safari and I decided that I prefer to have a truck than a Safari because the coppers were giving me a bad time at the club. A Detective, who later became an Inspector, told me straight out “We aren’t gonna tolerate having a Communist running a place like this. We’ll have you out of here in 12 months.” The writing was on the wall so I swapped over and I bought the Bedford for the reserve price and I’ve had it ever since. We set out early the following morning and managed to get south of the Willeroo turnoff where we camped for the night. The road from Willeroo to Wave Hill was in the process of being rebuilt with a major upgrade under the Federal Government’s National Beef Road development scheme. We crawled along most of the way between 15 and 20 m.p.h.