Basil is a kind and attentive host, particularly when evening scraps are his due. He might be ugly, scarred and with a bad case of bung-eye (I forgot to get some Golden Eye ointment for his conjunctivitis from the local clinic) that hopefully should be cleared up in a few days. He isn’t riddled with ticks and is obviously reasonably healthy – in mind and body. In all he is just a normal dog – except that he is (technically) homeless.

This brings us back to the Notice at the Nyirripi Store and begs the following question.
Has anyone bothered to ask the locals if they want the Police to shoot their dogs?
No? I thought not.

Dingoes play an important role in Australia’s ecosystems; they are apex predators and the continent’s largest terrestrial predator. Because of their attacks on livestock, dingoes and other wild dogs are seen as pests by the sheep industry and the resultant control methods normally run counter to dingo conservation efforts.

Out here fires can sometimes run for weeks – if not months – and burn-out huge tracts of land – I’ll try to keep a watching eye on this fire over the coming weeks – if you have any information on its progress please log in and post a note about its progress.

I love Amy Winehouse. You hear her records and just go “Oh, wow!” And her songwriting! “What kind of fuckery is this?”. She is inventing words. I remember when I first heard Macy Gray, I was listening to Triple J I think and that stopped the car. I thought “Wow!”. That is a voice, not an over-produced, octave-separated product, great soul and an interesting voice.

This is “Stripe“, who ended up with Gloria Morales, an animal carer that works at the Warlukurlangu Artists cooperative in Yuendumu – a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west 0f Alice Springs.

Ceciia Alfonso told me that “I take my dog Maliki to work every day – and I’m glad that the artists do as well. The only days that I leave Maliki at home is when he has a bad dose of the farts – they are truly horrible.”

AMRRIC is covering a wider field now in that we are trying to help out with not only facilitating vets into communities but also to help the local Shires with legislation, trying to increase awareness at the Federal government level of the problems with animal management nationally and we are also trying to increase education of the community.

Like many other aspects of life in Aboriginal communities the dogs there are far more visible in Aboriginal communities where there are few fences and the dogs can all be seen in public, whereas in the suburbs of Palmerston and Darwin the dogs are all behind fences and locked inside houses and you just don’t see them.

These dogs have been a large part of my life for the past three years – walking with them, talking to them, caring for the sick and injured, burying those stomped on by camels, kicked by bulls or bitten by snakes. I miss them terribly.