We share a fascination with raptors and in her most recent message she said:

Solitary Hawk! LIFER! 4 million migrating raptors for this season – not bad and still expecting four hundred thousand Turkey Vultures…Veracruz – River of Raptors.

Photo: Mercy Njeri

Mercy has been chasing the annual migratory movements of millions of raptors through the northern continental Americas and is now in Veracruz – where there is literally an aerial River of Raptors.

The wonderful people at HawkWatch International tell me will give Mercy and all the other lucky souls great views of:

Each fall, 4-6 million raptors migrate through Veracruz on their way to winter ranges in Central and South America. Because of the region’s geography, raptors from eastern, central, and western North America converge, providing visitors with a display unequaled anywhere on the planet.

As many as 2 million Broad-winged Hawks, 1 million Swainson’s Hawks, and 200,000 Mississippi Kites–nearly the entire world population for these three species–pass through Veracruz each fall. In addition, more than 1.5 million Turkey Vultures join the flight, as do thousands of other raptors, waterbirds, and songbirds.

Combine this with the hundreds of resident bird species in the state of Veracruz, and the scores of Olmec, Totonac, and Aztec archeological sites, all set in the friendly, unspoiled culture of east central Mexico, and you have the adventure of a lifetime.

Anyway – back to the barbie.

As anyone who has spent time in Mexico or the south-western USA will know, Armadillos are relatively common, and, as this entry at Wikipedia says:

Armadillos (mainly Dasypus) make common roadkill due to their habit of jumping to about fender height when startled (such as by an oncoming car). Wildlife enthusiasts are using the northward march of the armadillo as an opportunity to educate others about the animals, which can be a burrowing nuisance to property owners and managers.

Roadkill Armadillo. Photo: Professional Wildlife Removal

Anyway, in Mercy’s travels in Veracruz someone came up with the idea of barbecuing a few Armadillos.

Photo: Mercy Njeri

Mercy says that she is a bit ambivalent about the experience – delicious but:

Spiced Armadillo…poa lakini…ni Bush Meat…though nilimanga…now I am a vegetarian by circumstances…

Shell yenyewe ni ka ya tortoise…ati no nyama…tuiohere mehia maitu nitondu tutiui uria tureka…!

Super delicious, better than Crocodile meat!

Mercy told me that:

I preferred not to look at what i was munching because it gave me memories of our endangered African Elephant Shrew found in the Arabuko Sokoke Forest!

The meal is typical of traditional Mexican food. Eaten by locals and cannot be found in the markets – only occasionally in the homes of the locals. These was brought for us by the father of one of my colleague’s from upcountry.

Mercy didn’t have a recipe – “It’s a Mexican secret!!” – but I found this one from the folks over at Backwoods Bound:

Bar-B-Q’d Armadillo

Thanks to Jason Hunter for sending this recipe.

~ 1 armadillo

~ bacon grease

~ 1 cup butter

~ 1/2 cup ketchup

~ 1/2 cup grated onion

~ 2 tbsp mustard

~ tabasco to taste

In a sauce pan, combine the butter, ketchup, onion, mustard and tabasco. Heat over low heat until the butter is melted. Stir occasionally.

Rub bacon grease into the armadillo.

Grill over a hot fire for 5 minutes.

Reduce the fire by half.

Baste the meat with the sauce until done. Armadillo is cooked like pork.

Serve and Enjoy!

Serve and enjoy indeed! Photo: Mercy Njeri

Marie’s first book, Every Secret Thing, was published in September 2009 by the University of Queensland Press.

The publishers blurb says that in Every Secret Thing:

When culture and faith collide…nothing is sacred. In the Aboriginal missions of far northern Australia, it was a battle between saving souls and saving traditional culture. Every Secret Thing is a rough, tough, hilarious portrayal of the Bush Mob and the Mission Mob, and the hapless clergy trying to convert them. In these tales, everyone is fair game. At once playful and sharp, Marie Munkara’s wonderfully original stories cast a taunting new light on the mission era in Australia.

Told with biting wit and riotous humour’ – Judges’ comments, Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (2008)

For mine Every Secret Thing is one of the best books written about life in the Northern Territory since Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia – that’s a pretty big call but I reckon this book is just as funny, brave and deadly serious as that grumpy old curmudgeon’s masterpiece.

And I’m more than happy for you to disagree – but first read what Marie has to say here – and then go and buy her book.

In this first part of the interview we talk about how she came to write Every Secret Thing, her thoughts about what for me is the fine line of humour that runs through the book and her thoughts on the process of writing.

The Northern Myth – You were born in Arnhem Land but grew up on the Tiwi islands?

Marie Munkara – Yes, I was born on the banks of the Mainoru River in central Arnhem Land and then went to Nguiu on the Tiwi islands when I was about 18 months old. I was sent down south when I was 3 years old and went back to Tiwi when I was 28.

TNM – In September 2008 you won the David Unaipon Award for best unpublished manuscript by an Aboriginal writer person.

MM – Yes and “Every Secret Thing” was published by the University of Queensland Press in early September 2009 and was first launched in Brisbane, where UQP is based, and the Darwin launch was held in early October.

TNM – This is your first book? Are there any more coming? From reading it seems like you’ve got a lot more stories to tell.

MM - Oh, yeah!. There are a few more stories and books coming, don’t you worry about that!

TNM – How does it feel to have that book in your hands after all this time and effort?

MM – It was really amazing (laughs)…it was like giving birth to a child. There it is!

TNM – When people talk to you about it how do you feel?

MM – I’m quite pleased with myself and I’m quite intrigued. Everyone has different impressions about the book. I thought everyone would react the same to the same passages – you know, “That was funny” etc and there are some parts that I didn’t even think twice about. But people come up and say “Oh, that was my favourite part of the book”.

TNM – Do you re-read it or just put it out there and say – its gone now…

MM – No, it is out there, it is done. There are always things you would change – but you just have to put those things to rest and be happy with what you’ve done and move on to the next one.

TNM – When did you start writing and what did you write about when you started?

MM – Well, I’ve always written stories since I was a kid. This was just going to be a short story entry – based on the first chapter of the book – for the NT Literary Awards and it didn’t make it – it wasn’t shortlisted. So I just thought I could add a bit because it didn’t really say all that I wanted to say. Every Secret Thing took me 12 months to write and it was just a fantastic thing – I enjoyed every moment of it.

TNM – What do you do when you write – block out a few hours at a time or just bang away on the keys when you find time?

MM – For me it just becomes a routine – my daughters would go off to school, I’d do a bit of cleaning for half an hour and then sit down and off I go until they come home. Sometimes a bit of an idea would come into my head in the middle of the night but I’m lucky in that I can wake up in the morning and get into it – I don’t forget those ideas.

TNM – Do you show work to other people? Do you talk to other writers about what you are writing?

MM – No, mostly I just go off and do it. Occasionally I’ll get a good friend to read a chapter so that I can get a good idea of where it is going. No-one has ever been negative about it so that has been one good thing. I just get into it.

TNM – What about countrymen and family? You write about some fairly sensitive issues here, have people talked to you about that side of things?

MM – No, no-one in my family has read it yet! I’m just waiting for the responses to the book from them. Initially the material in Every Secret Thing came from things I would hear my family talk about while we were sitting around yarning. We would be laughing about what so and so did and remember when this or that happened. That is where it all started from and those ideas get a life of their own.

TNM – Someone said to me that you were very brave to talk about the personal and sexual issues in Every Secret Thing the way that you do. Do you feel brave?

MM – No, not really. It wasn’t even planned that way. If I had sat down and said “I’ve got to write a story about this business” I wouldn’t be able to do it. I really only wanted to write down some of the funny stuff so that one day my daughters would be able to know what happened and how things were for their mother, grandmother and other people. I didn’t write Every Secret Thing to be brave or funny. It is just something that came out of my head and I had a great lot of fun doing it!

TNM – You take no prisoners with your humour – everyone is up for it. Where does that deep funny side come from?

MM – Well, some of it is probably genetic! (laughs) I didn’t actually set out to make it funny – I just wanted to be sarcastic. Someone said to me recently “It is so hard to write humour, how do you do it?” and I could only respond that “I’m not actually writing to be funny, I’m just writing what is in my head and to be sarcastic.”

TNM – When you write about the anthropologist, for example, and the piss-taking that you have people inflicting on him, that is certainly sarcastic!

MM – That was actually based upon a true set of events. I won’t mention the anthropologist’s name but I’m sure if people put two and five together they will be able to work it out. My grandfather told me that story – and he is one of the characters in there of course.

TNM – Tell me about the writing process. Did you ever feel blocked?

MM – No, never! It just…it was almost like someone else was writing it through me. I never felt blocked and every moment was a joy – it was a really, really wonderful thing. And when I wrote the last sentence I knew that it was the last sentence.

In the next part of the Interview Marie and I will talk about her take on the sexual politics – and related issues – that she writes about in her book. Stay tuned for that because what she has to say about those issues is as interesting as her words and thoughts in Every Secret Thing.

Have you read Every Secret Thing? Have any thoughts or comments you’d like to make about Marie’s words or her book?

Register here and leave a comment!

Predictably the Bolter has picked this up and Australia’s blog with the most hits, and perhaps the least sense, has attracted the usual raft of ill-informed comments.

The Northern Myth isn’t familiar with the work of Mark Hughes, but Helen Hughes is a familiar conservative commentator with an interesting twist on matters indigenous and who has recently turned her attention to remote Aboriginal education in the NT.

And not without some controversy.

As reported by the National Indigenous Times in April 2008, Hughes wrote an opinion piece, published in The Australian, that drew on examples from one small north-east Arnhem Land homeland, drawing the following very general analysis from that meagre dataset:

“There are about 10,000 of these illiterate non-numerate teenagers who have been going to school … What is the government of the NT going to do about these 10,000 children?”

But [then] NT Deputy Chief Minister Marion Scrymgour has dismissed her findings and says the claims are “absolutely insulting and offensive”.

“I just find it astounding that she bases a report and a generalisation across the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities based on one small homeland centre that she has visited,” she said. Ms Scrymgour said Prof Hughes had left out “some fundamental pieces of information” and denied the government was providing misleading figures on education standards in the bush.

Nadine Williams, NT president of the Australian Education Union, said Prof Hughes needed to “stop generalising”.

“It would be helpful if Helen Hughes had ever been to some of the places she’s talking about,” she said.

Anyway, now it seems that Hughes and her research assistants are at it again.

In their opinion piece of last Friday, the Hughes’ say that, due to the NT Education Department’s training requirements for remote-based teachers:

Homeland Learning Centres lose eight weeks – almost 25 per cent of the school year – while their staff attend courses for the first and last weeks of each term.

Taking that statement on face value you would think that in each of the hundreds of small homeland schools across the NT students spend two months of each school year sitting in classrooms without teachers.

Fortunately for the students the Hughes’s version of events is at some considerable distance from reality.

It is true that at the top and tail of each term that a bunch of teachers from all over the NT – from homeland and “mainstream” schools – go off for professional development training.

But not all teachers go for that training at the same time. Depending on demand, individual needs or other factors some go several times a year, some perhaps once or twice.

And relief teachers and local Aboriginal team teachers are rostered on to fill the gaps.

How do I know this?

I asked a couple of the teachers here at Yirrkala where I’m staying with family while working on my Aboriginal bird knowledge book project.

The second line of attack that the Hughes’ make – on remote community festivals – suffers the same problem – a few facts and a dose of reality mug their story of apparent bureaucratic indulgence and neglect of the best interests of remote students.

The Hughes’s say that:

The limited school year is further eroded by cultural festivals and sports events regularly scheduled during school hours.

The commonwealth government is a serious offender with its Community Festivals for Education Engagement program. Under this program, 13 indigenous festivals are being held this year…all are held during term time rather than during school holidays.
…
As in previous years, the successful Garma Festival ran this year during the school term in August. Many children lost up to two weeks’ schooling. It would take little effort to reschedule next year’s Garma dates to the July school holidays. Financial sponsors of the festival, including the commonwealth and Northern Territory governments and high-profile private companies, should ensure this change is made.

Being in Yirrkala, just down the road from the Garma festival site at Gulkula, I was curious about the reference to the “many children” that apparently lost up to a fortnight of valuable schooling because of their attendance at Garma.

As the very informative Garma Festival website notes, the festival ran from 7 to 11 August this year – that is Friday through Tuesday.

I asked the organisers of the Garma Festival, the Yothu Yindi Foundation, about the Hughes’ claims.

The CEO of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, Alan James, told me that:

Garma formally starts at 4pm on Friday afternoon. The forums all finish by 4pm Monday afternoon – resulting in one school day “lost”.

Garma is not part of the Federal Government’s “Community Festivals for Education Engagement” program.

The music and multimedia training programs are integral parts of Garma and these operate in consultation and engagement with schools and other educational institutions and provides credits towards VET accreditation, so it is very much a part of formal schooling.

And in relation to the Hughes’ demand that Garma be moved to the June school holidays, Alan James said that:

Garma is strategically linked to a number of other events that are held in the Top End of the NT in and around August. Cooperation between Garma and the organisers of other large events is essential to ensure that logistical bottlenecks – on a national and local scale – are avoided where possible.

August kicks off with the week-long Darwin Cup Festival, then the three core days of Garma (with an extra couple of days for the tourists) the next weekend, followed by the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Awards in Darwin the following week. The fortnight of the Darwin Festival follows.

The other important consideration – bearing in mind that the more than 2,500 people attending Garma are camping in tents – is that August is the driest time of year – the last thing we want is for Garma to be rained out.

As the Hughes’ should know – but apparently didn’t bother to find out for themselves – one of the most successful events at Garma is the Garma Miwatj Youth Forum, a cooperative venture with Anglicare NT.

As Ann Buxton, Executive Manager for the Youth, Family and Remote area programs at Anglicare NT, told the Senate Select Committee on Regional and Remote Indigenous Communities Inquiry at Hearings in Darwin in May this year:

Over the past four years Anglicare, in conjunction with the Yothu Yindi Foundation, started the Garma Miwatj Youth Forum, which runs parallel to the annual Garma Festival.

We bring together about 250 young people from communities in the regions and it has become a key event.

We promote youth leadership, do a lot of skills development work, and look at issues that young people are experiencing.
Garma has become an important event. It is a little event compared with the overall festival but it helps to give young people in that region a role.

For some time many elders have been interested in supporting young people, getting them engaged in processes, and putting some positive energy into some of the issues that they are dealing with. This forum, which has become important, also brings together about 40 organisations from around that region to help get it off the ground.

It is a great event.

A great event indeed – a bit of training, mentoring, skills development, community support and engagement and lots of positive energy and maybe a fair bit of fun.

Perhaps that is what so bothers the Hughes’ – the idea that a few kids might “lose” a day of school while they do the hard yards at Garma and have some fun while they are at it.

But in the apparently joyless world of the Hughes’ vision of remote education that would represent an abject failure by governments of their core responsibilities to school-children.

There is more – much more – that I could say about the Hughes’ opinion piece – including that their comments about the Central Desert Shire’s policy of only supporting cultural and sporting events held during school holidays was old news and the quotes attributed to the Shire CEO, Rowan Foley and the Shire President, Norbert Patrick, are cast in the present tense.

If the Hughes’ had done some basic research- like having a look at the Council Minutes for the Meeting of 30 September or reading this ABC News report – they would have found out that Foley was stood down as CEO at that meeting.

“Motion 3 was amended to the following: “Whereas the Central Desert Shire has recently suffered the resignation and loss of key personnel attributable to the management style of the CEO, and there have been various complaints lodged relating to the conduct of the CEO and Council management, the Council resolves to direct that the CEO step down on pay for the time being and that LGANT be approached for assistance in resolving the crisis that has developed”. Moved: Councillor Bruce Finter. Seconded: Councillor Ned Hargreaves.”

Sounds to me very much like a Council in crisis management mode.

Makes the Hughes’ call of “Three cheers for the Central Desert Shire!” sound just a bit hollow – particularly when you consider that one of the two organisations to be funded by the Commonwealth’s Community Festivals for Education Engagement 2009 – the Ti-Tree school, according to the information on the Commonwealth website, held it’s festival from Tuesday October 13 to Thursday October 15.

In term time.

And the local governing authority with responsibility for municipal services at Ti-Tree is…you guessed it, the Central Desert Shire.

Wadeye township

I’ve written here recently about the fantastic (in the original sense of that word) approach that The Australian and its dwindling number of northern correspondents take to just about anything to do with Aboriginal affairs here in the NT.

This past weekend The Weekend Australian continued this dubious tradition when it ran this piece from its northern correspondent, Nicolas Rothwell.

Rothwell examines apparently new economic and governance developments at the troubled remote township of Wadeye, in the west of the NT’s Top End.

And Rothwell, after many years in the NT, has apparently finally realised what anyone with any experience in remote Australia would have found out a long time ago – that Wadeye, like most small townships in the NT, and elsewhere – is a town that is “mostly ordered and peaceful”.

If you take the assertions in Rothwells piece at face value you would think that the good citizens of Wadeye had turned their backs on all forms of Australian mainstream governance and were boldly charting a course of their own, free from the controls imposed by Australian governments at all levels.

As Rothwell says:

“…what bureaucracy gives, it can also take away. Not only did the federal intervention of mid-2007 sweep through Wadeye; the Thamarrurr local council was wound up as the Northern Territory unveiled its new regional shires. The council, though, gave birth to a new Thamarrurr Development Corporation, which was bolstered by strong support from the Rudd government. The upshot of this administrative upheaval was a deepened desire among the Wadeye leadership group to pursue their own path.
…
“The idea aims to assert control over their own region and in time to supplant the long-established Northern Land Council, which is widely seen as a moribund arm of the Territory Labor Party. “We will set up our own council,” Nganbe says bluntly. TDC’s Berto says: “There’s a lot of people here not happy with the NLC and its complete lack of service, and its standing in the way of progress. We want to set the political agenda from the ground.”

And notwithstanding the brief reference to “strong support” from the Rudd government, Rothwell reckons that the people of Wadeye:

“…don’t like the deal on offer from mainstream Australia’s authorities. They want to keep their own culture, they want economic development and they want it on their own terms, under their control.”

What Rothwell is of course talking about here is localised Aboriginal self-determination, an aspiration that he has frequently, and as recently as six weeks ago, condemned to the dustbin of Australian political history:

“For some time it has been clear Aboriginal self-determination has had its day.”

Due credit should be given to the good citizens of Wadeye for getting their act together in what are incredibly difficult circumstances. By all accounts they have established a range of business enterprises that will provide real jobs and offer economic opportunities to locals.

Rothwell implies that the people of Wadeye have achieved these successes in spite of the bureaucratic and administrative barriers set up by governments at every turn. But it may be that a few inconvenient facts – for Rothwell’s thesis at least – might explain a somewhat different basis for some of Wadeye’s recent successes.

The bureaucracies that Rothwell says have taken so much from the people of Wadeye with one hand have been very busy giving bucketloads of money to the recently-established Thamarrurr Development Corporation Ltd (the TDC) with the other.

The TDC is a non-profit commercial operation limited by guarantee with no shareholders – just members that represent the 20 clan groups of the Wadeye region.

In the 2008/2009 round of funding for the Indigenous Heritage Program announced on 7 July 2008, the TDC was given two grants to a total of $62,704 for “the investigation and management of cultural heritage” of the Thamarrurr region.

On 8 October 2008 Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced that TDC would receive $500,000 as “an establishment grant to deliver a range of business services” to the Wadeye region.

At it’s meeting of 10 February 2009, the Victoria Daly Shire Council (the Council), the local government body that replaced Thamarrurr’s predessor, the Thamarrurr Regional Council, passed the following Motion:

“That Council agrees to lease for one dollar ($1.00) to Thamarrurr Development Corporation for the period from the 10th of February 2009 to the 7th of December 2009 all non – fixed assets.”

At the following meeting on 7 April 2009, the Council, in the course of the Confirmation of the Minutes of the previous meeting, amended that Motion:

“The minutes of the ordinary meeting, item (8) TDC were amended with a further dot point
added, saying that if all the above conditions were met the vehicles would then be sold to the TDC for the sum of $1.00. The minutes were  then taken as read and accepted as a true record of the Meeting.”

The value of the assets leased to the TDC for $1, according to the Report provided to Council, was $760,073.

According to the same report, the insured value of the vehicles to be sold to Tharmarrurr upon it meeting Council’s conditions was $482,273.

You can read the Minutes of Council meetings and the Report from Council staff for yourself here.

On 4 March 2009, by joint press release Minister Macklin and Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon announced that TDC would receive a total of $650,000 to provide painting services and the purchase of civil construction machinery.

On 11 June 2009, in another joint press release, Snowdon and Macklin announced that TDC would receive a total of $1.422 million to purchase a mobile concrete batching plant and to provide accommodation for “key staff” at Wadeye.

As the ABC reported last month, the Thamarrurr Association, (also based at Wadeye but a separate entity to the TDC) following representations from then NT Indigenous Policy Minister Alison Anderson, received a $250,000 grant from the NT government in circumstances yet to be fully explained:

“Ms Anderson secured $250,000 of taxpayer funds for a corporation run by the powerful Yunupingu family in Arnhem Land, including Galarrwuy Yunupingu. The only other organisation to get $250,000 for community consultation is the Thamarrur Association at Wadeye, which has never declared an income before. The Government has not announced the payments and is yet to explain how the companies were selected. It says the money will pay for consultation on the Working Futures policy to help the Government get its service delivery right.”

I’ve not yet been able establish any direct connection between the TDC and the Thamarrurr Association – other than that they both do the same kind of business in the same small town.

On my back-of the-envelope reckoning the TDC has received control over $760,000 worth of assets for the bargain basement price of a single dollar from their local Council and, including the grant to the Thamarrurr Association, close enough to $3.5 million from the NT and Federal governments.

Not bad for a group that Rothwell says, “…don’t like the deal on offer from mainstream Australia.”

And what of the assertions in Rothwell’s article by TDC’s John Berto of the Northern Land Council’s “…complete lack of service, and its standing in the way of progress” at Wadeye?

John Berto should know all about the NLC and service delivery at Wadeye. After all, he had been a long-term employee of the NLC and for a period up to late 2006 he was the NLC’s Deputy CEO.

But Rothwell and Berto would also be aware of the benefits to the Traditional Owners of the Wadeye region (and beyond) resulting from the NLC’s negotiations on their behalf over the Blacktip gas plant and pipeline.

The deal negotiated by the NLC has given, and will provide into the future, significant economic and social benefits to the traditional owners and residents of the Wadeye region.

Indeed, there is every appearance that Rothwell consciously excluded these well-known and readily available facts from his piece because they did not support his oft-repeated spurious claims about the NLC. I found all of the material noted above after about ten minutes of searching on the web and a bit of scurrying about in the backblocks of various websites.

Rothwell ends his piece with a dubious comparison between Longreach in far-western Queensland and Wadeye, implying that Wadeye should be accorded the same services, government support and facilities as Longreach.

Longreach is a service centre in a region with a long history of extensive & highly productive mining, pastoral and agricultural activity. It is also has roads that lead from somewhere to somewhere else.

Wadeye services only itself and a few small homelands. It is at the wrong end of a long and rough road in a region with no history of pastoral, agricultural or any other significant development – apart from the above-mentioned Blacktip gas project.

Pity about those annoying facts getting in the way of a fantastic story.

Declaration: Bob Gosford has worked for the Northern Land Council as a legal advisor, most recently in 2008. He had no involvement in matters at Wadeye apart from a single meeting with an early version of the Thamarrurr council in about 2000.

Pilbara languages map from Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre

I’m sitting here in the “Balgo Hilton” waiting for someone to come back from where I’ve just been.

We most likely passed each other on the road sometime yesterday as I struggled up the 530 kilometres of the torture that is known as the Tanami Track from Yuendumu up here to Wirrimanu – formerly known as Balgo.

When I got here and asked after him they told me he’d gone to Yuendumu earlier that day and was expected back here tonight.

So I’ll try to catch up with him early tomorrow.

Meanwhile I’m going through my notes on Aboriginal bird knowledge from around here and the other regions of the north west of western Australia that I’ll be travelling through over the next few weeks.

As I was sorting I came across some excerpts that I’d found in Taruru: Aboriginal Song Poetry From the Pilbara by C.G. Brandenstein and A.P. Thomas and published by Rigby of Adelaide in 1974.

At 92 pages Taruru is a modest work but it is packed with song poems in a number of languages of the Pilbara – which appears, and have a look at the map above, to be one of the most linguistically diverse parts of the country.

To find out more about the language and cultures in this fascinating and far-flung corner of the country the website of the Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre is a great place to start.

Here are some of the bird song poems from Taruru:

BIRD’S CALL

Tjalurra in Jindiparndi, by Robert Churnside

Ku?urru murlawarnjgaa juurumarna karnalilila

ku?urru murlawarnjgaa juurumarna tarritogula

The Kurrugu bird-call finds his melody in the morning

Kurrugu bird-call finds his melody in the treehole.

THE CROWS

Tabi in Karierra, by Tjarndai

njalataianna pannina kudii nagunjuru

pilanmannaba takanna.

palakuru pala kardi?iriba pannigu

tinatingala juurra-manjulaba mirrunjgu

palakuru pala waarnarraba warnjga “kaa”

warnda murrumurru tanbatirriiba wurdanjga

They lurk and sit till they see a bone

What they can get, they grab

They hang around, eyeing something off.

Hopping about in the sun,

Conversing: “Kaa, kaa, kaa.”

Then its up to the back of a branch

One after another – what a crowd.

EMU SHOT

Tabi in Ngarluma, by Tjinapirrgarri

maguranagu tundunjarranpiru

maguranagu njali kangaragu

warnjgatinara karruluu padanna

warnjgatinara poolkarrinagu

ilinpinnuru karruluu padanna

ilinpinnuru poolkarrinagu

wibururuba marnjgula jirrgagu

karlinjkarlinjbala

At the bobbing head he aims,

At the bobbing head, at the upper neck.

The shots whistle, hitting the river stones.

The shots whistle, as it lies there riddled.

Feathers leap, hitting the river stones.

Feathers leap, as it lies there riddled.

The emu chicks run to and fro

Coming back again and again.

THE BULBUL BIRD

Tabi in Ngarluma, by Waljbira

Bulbul pannii nurdu,

Bulbul pannii nurdu

murii tinamanma, jabulkurruu karadilipanjuru

Bulbul pannii nurdu,

Bulbul pannii nurdu

murii tinamanma, jabalkurruu karadilipaia

jinda nuru pannii Pabamudunjgana

njaiin wirlimanma, kururdkakanma njuu

jinda nuru pannii Pabamudunjgana

njaiin wirlimanma, kururdaga.

Bulbul is here

Follow the stony creek, your track to northern shores!

Bulbul is here

This pool is “water throughout the year”

Stir my heart and also give it a rest

(rest is missing)

PELICAN AND HERON

Pundut in Jindiparndi

(traditional)

kandanjarrima pilarra!

tamanjgajini padarmarrijanju-peerl!  peerl!  peerl!

hou!

Leave your old leg-spear alone!

Let’s hurl fire-sticks at each other!

Kill!  Kill!  Kill!

THE PEEWIT AND THE WHITE COCKATOO CHICK

Pundut in Jindjiparndi

(traditional)

njaiimbaa karparna mungamunganina

wiluurumarna kardanpadimarna

pirdiranalu tida wadinjani

hou!

I then took it away and improved on it:

White and the neck striped,

Better than the white cockatoo’s chick

Which turned out rather badly.

I don’t have the right keyboard settings to enter some of the linguistic notations (there are several couplings of “n” & “j” (I’ve forgotten the technical term!) above that are usually represented by an “n” with the downstroke of the “j” incorporated into it. There are also several graves, acutes and umlauts that I’ve not been able to enter.

I’ve come across a fair bit of poetry and song-texts in the course of my research and I’ll post a few more of them as I work my way though my notes and research.

The poems from Taruru provide me with some interesting perspectives on how people imagine and record their knowledge of birds.

I struggle to understand the meaning of Pundut’s The Peewit and the White Cockatoo Chick, but a little research may provide some clarity.

Both The Crows and Emu Shot are beautiful and fine-grained descriptions of two common birds – one often seen as an intelligent and engaging pest, the other an important element in local economic and religious life.

And I’m looking for more in other material that von Brandenstein recorded in the north-west. If you know of any other Aboriginal poetry about birds please don’t hesitate to pass it on.

And just for a further update, at the bottom I’ve included a par from Endeavour Consulting’s views about the recent events in the NT and the “misleading and eccentric” reporting of recent events in the NT by The Australian journalists – as reported in Crikey yesterday.

Over the weekend of Saturday & Sunday 15 & 16 August The Australian maintained it’s bizarre position that Alison Anderson was a visionary that could do no wrong and was now a victim of a dastardly conspiracy by a manipulative Gerry Wood and the forces of absolute evil behind NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson’s ruthless determination to hang on to power at the expense of “her people” – whomever they may be.

There are, of course, many other more considered views about Anderson’s recent contributions to political life in the NT.

And, as Alice Brennan of the ABC in Alice Springs reported on Friday 14 August – there is at least one mob of “her people” that are less than impressed with Alison Anderson, at least in her capacity as their local member:

“Rebel MLA ignoring us: community. The residents of Ampilatwatja, 325 kilometres north of Alice Springs, walked off their community a month ago protesting against their living conditions. A spokesman for the Ampilatwatja community, which is in Ms Anderson’s electorate, says it is disappointed they have not heard from the politician. “Nothing,” Richard Downs said. “It just shows to me what sort of a person she is. “She doesn’t have concerns enough to give us a call and say, ‘Look, I’m going to visit with you, I’m going to listen to you and see what we can do.’ “You know the rules, you should have stayed in there and looked after your constituents – that’s both black and white. “Look, do what you want to do but we certainly ain’t gonna support you no longer.”

As reported previously by Crikey and much more colourfully and disdainfully at VexNews here and here, being a journalist or political spinner in Darwin these days carries some serious personal and professional risks.

And, not least among the small gene pool of journalists and spinners in the NT, The Australian’s local journalists appear to have been in the recent political mess in the NT up to their necks.

On the weekend in question The Weekend Australian’s coverage of the outcome of the biggest political crisis in the short and inglorious history of the self-governing NT was limited to this cursory assessment by Natasha Robinson of Friday the 14th’s proceedings in the NT Parliament and to publishing the full text of Anderson’s self-serving-in-shameless-defeat-but-none-of-it-was-my-fault speech to the Legislative Assembly during that Friday’s marathon sittings.

As this excerpt shows, Anderson’s speech was pretty much all-about-Alison:

“I have always been a passionate politician; I speak out for what I believe in. I spoke out against the Labor government when it took over Aboriginal land at McArthur River. I crossed the floor with two of my Indigenous colleagues. I did not have to cross the floor then; it was not my people, it was not my land. The fact that the Labor government extinguished the right of these Aboriginal people forever is what made me act on my principles and come to support the member for Arnhem on that occasion. Two years ago, I spoke out for the federal Intervention when Territory Labor wished it had never happened. Now, I have spoken out against SIHIP, the biggest scandal I have seen in my political career. I have left the government and given away my ministerial portfolios. I am not one to keep quiet when the wellbeing of my people is at stake, but my Labor colleagues were quite prepared to sweep this disaster under the carpet.”

The Australian’s nominal contingent of three NT-based journalists has been numerically diminished since Natasha Robinson fled southward late last year after reportedly declaring her inability to work with local “Chief”, Paul Toohey, who himself recently pulled the pin on principle from News Limited over “Northern Correspondent”, and current partner of Anderson, Nicolas Rothwell’s closeness to the recent chaos in the NT.

Rothwell is by all accounts unwilling to write about current events in NT politics without making a declaration to his readers about his relationship to Anderson. Robinson is now back in the NT and is supported by a bevy of other flacks not seen here before and that seem unsuccessfully to be trying to fill the substantial gap left by Toohey’s absence. Toohey is apparently looking for work in Darwin and may well turn up to strut his stuff at the wonderful little Darwin nightclub “Happy Yess” this Saturday night with his occasional band, The Presley Boys.

Crikey had earlier sought details of the rumoured declarations of the relationship between Rothwell and Anderson made by Rothwell to both his superiors at News Limited and to various politicians and staffers at the NT Parliament but received no responses.

Meanwhile, from the same Murdoch stable as The Australian, the local daily tabloid NT News has come through the last couple of months with a greatly enhanced reputation as the local journal of record.

Previously more well-known for it’s “tits-and-crocs” coverage rather than in-depth political analysis, the NT News has, during the recent series of rolling constitutional crises that have beset the NT , presented some of the best journalism on local politics I’ve seen in the twenty-five years I’ve had the general misfortune to read it.

Over the last few weeks in particular its coverage and commentary has been thorough and insightful and it can rightfully claim, through the work of Nigel Adlam and Nick Calacouras in particular, that it has led the journalistic charge and provided both a source of valuable commentary and an all-too-rare outlet for reader’s opinions via its letters and the publication of reams of text messages.

I cannot say how long this golden thread of quality in NT journalism will last – but judging by the manner and tone of this response from NT News Editor Julian Ricci to comments made in a Crikey piece by David Curl last week – informed and insightful comment and real citizen access to its pages might be hanging around in the Top End’s only daily for a good while yet:

The editor of Northern Territory News Julian Ricci writes: There are so many blatant falsehoods and inaccuracies in the dribble that appeared under David Curl’s byline (twice) that it barely deserves a response. But he, and Crikey, cannot be allowed to get off that lightly.

Curl (yesterday Item 10 NT washup:desperately seeking stability) writes that the recent Territory government crisis was precipitated by the resignation of two ministers who both resigned citing articles in the NT News, and not over some major policy issue. That bit’s at least true … well, at least, that’s what both former ministers are on the record as saying when they stepped down. He states that both pieces were written by senior journalist Nigel Adlam. Wrong. The first article was written by political reporter Nick Calacouras which led to the resignation of Minister for Indigenous Policy Marion Scrymgour.

The second was a commentary piece written by Adlam at the senior editorial team’s direction. It was the opinion of the newspaper. The new Minister for Indigenous Policy Alison Anderson blamed Chief Minister Henderson’s lack of rebuttal for her resignation.

…

Finally, Curl states “free speech and independent opinion* are also in dangerously short supply” in the Territory. We say if Curl regards the NT’s non-aligned daily newspaper, a regional bi-weekly, four community newspapers, several regional weeklies, the ABC, three commercial TV stations and many more radio stations as a “dangerously short supply”, he must regard Sydney and Melbourne as the only population centres where people can relax, free of the misplaced fear of manipulated news coverage.

FOOTNOTE*: Over the last nine days of the political crisis the NT News published more than 100 letters and more than 350 text messages on the subject from its readers.

And finally, as promised above, this from Endeavour Consulting’s “Political Developments in Australia – July 2009” as reported in Crikey yesterday:

Indigenous housing and the defection of Alison Anderson: “Anderson’s position is, of course, completely spurious. The delays in delivering the housing package essentially demonstrates the Commonwealth’s ongoing incompetence in delivering any social programs in the NT… These developments demonstrate the continuing poisoning of NT indigenous affairs and politics by the NT indigenous intervention, which has caused the breaking up of political alliances and divisions within the Aboriginal leadership group. The negative effects of this have been reinforced by the misleading and eccentric coverage of NT issues in News Ltd publications.”

Got a comment about the NT News, The Australian, The ABC or any other coverage of the recent events in the NT?

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The folks over at the oddly named (particularly for a firm wanting to make money from the shortcomings of others) spellr.us really do have a point – if the biggest and brightest universities can’t get it right, who is left that we can trust? Governments?

Though you would think that spellr.us, particularly seeing that they want to separate us from our hard-earned,  would at least have a typo-free public face.

This Media Release has been circulating the web for the last couple of days:

13 of the World’s Top 20 Universities Misspell “University” on Their Own Website

Top 10 Most Commonly Misspelled Words. Sydney, Australia, July 7, 2009 – An analysis by enterprise website spell checking platform spellr.us has revealed that on average, 14.2% of web pages on the world’s most prestigious university websites contain at least one genuine spelling error.

The annual spellr.us Higher Education Online Content Survey found that these spelling mistakes ranged from obscure, easy to overlook slip-ups to obvious and embarrassing blunders.

The word “university”, for example, was misspelled by 13 of the world’s top 20 educational institutions . Other significant errors included Harvard Law School’s misspell ing of “professor” on a primary navigation menu , and Ivy League neighbour Yale University’s misspell ing of “Yale University”

Nice to see that even the mob at spellr.us can forget the odd hyphen and period from time to time…

You can see Kevin Garber, the founder of spellr.us in a rather smug little video here

Rrrright now you can get a rabble of the master’s songs starting with “R” if you go to Paul’s homeage and follow the links to A to Z.

Over the last few years, Paul Kelly has performed a series of unique shows under the banner ‘A to Z’, whereby he sings 100 songs from his catalogue in alphabetical order over 4 nights. He is mainly alone on stage, joined occasionally by guests. These shows have sold out consistently in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide.

Every month, for FREE download one letter’s worth of songs will be available here at his website.

At the end of two years, over 100 songs will have been available for free downloads.

Some months will be fat, others skinny but rest assured, throughout, you will hear Paul Kelly’s characters portrayed in his lyrics as they love, marry, give birth, die, and speak.

And soon there will be, as Paul so succinctly says, A to Z – “S”

A shitload, a swarm, a sibilance, a storm, a (t)sunami of “S”s for all you sweethearts this month. Dan Kelly helps me out on a few, Sian Prior plays clarinet on Summer Rain and Trev Warner from Adelaide plays mandolin on Stumbling Block.

Surely God Was A Lover is based on a poem by John Shaw Neilson written around a hundred years ago. Sydney From A 747 dips the hat to the elusive Texan band The Flatlanders, and their song Dallas From A DC9.

Suck ‘em and see. Shake the sauce bottle and all that. There’s a ton of Ts coming so make some room on those hard drives.

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
SMOKE UNDER THE BRIDGE
SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY
SONGS OF THE OLD RAKE
SOUTH OF GERMANY
STANDING ON THE STREET OF EARLY SORROWS
STORIES OF ME
STUMBLING BLOCK
SUMMER RAIN
SURELY GOD WAS A LOVER
SWEET GUY
SYDNEY FROM A 747

Also on the website are some loving tributes to Maurice Frawley, with whom I spent some time working while he was in various versions of Paul’s bands in the early eighties – and of course the music scene in Melbourne was so tight (in more than the cohesive sense!) that you couldn’t avoid such a lovely guy as Maurice.

My pick of the tributes is this from Bill Miller, ex (I think) of the short-lived Melbourne pop group The Ferrets.

In the Australian rock music scene, there aren’t many fully fledged, over 50, gypsy musicians, who live for their music, and live hard, yet are loved by all they meet. Maurice was one. Yarn with him, and the topic would very quickly be ‘music’, and his face would light up with the sheer joy of being a part of that world. He genuinely encouraged every muso he came in contact with. Young or old. A circle was completed last year when Maurice taught guitar at Rochester High School.
He was one of the old style Aussie rockers who loved nothing more than jamming with his many mates. This habit of jamming, which was like eating or breathing to Maurice and his ilk, has all but died out in today’s music world of samples, computers and keyboards.
I ran into him at the end of one of his country tours, and asked him how he was going. His black jeans had obviously been on him for a few weeks (par for the course for gypsy musicians), and he looked a little dishevelled, but that glint was in his eye as he smiled: “I’m good, I’ve just got a little bit of Tourbum.” Like nearly every line he came out with, that line sounded like the opening to yet another Frawley gem of a song.

After his stint in ‘The Japanese Comix’ (1979-80), he co-wrote classic pop songs, including “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” during his time as a guitarist with Paul Kelly and the Dots (1980-84). ‘The Olympic Sideburns’ (1983-86), producing an EP for ‘The Romeos’ (1989) and ‘Maurice Frawley’s Big City Burnout’ (1990) followed, before Maurice penned a string of top shelf cds which he performed with his band “The Working Class Ringos” (1993-2006). From 2006 he wrote, recorded and performed with ‘Maurice Frawley and The Yard Hands’.

The Northern Myth couldn’t make it but understands that the hot topic of the evening was the righteous outrage of ex-NT Minister Marion Scrymgour and her attacks on her own party’s recent disastrous homelands policy – which as I wrote in Crikey earlier this week has recently been overseen by Nicolas’s partner, Territory Minister for Indigenous Affairs Alison Anderson.

Anderson, to whom The Red Highway is dedicated, was accompanied to the launch by her staunch ally and fellow Minister, Malandirri McCarthy.

In The Red Highway, Rothwell, according to his publisher’s blurb:

“…has unforgettable, even mystical encounters: with a priest, an explorer, a collector and a hunter. It becomes a quest – for knowledge and a sense of home – that builds to a stunning culmination.”

Robert Desaix says that:

“Rothwell’s calm wondering at what he sees and hears on his travels left me with a feeling of enchantment.”

Others, it seems, are less than enchanted by Rothwell’s view of the life lived on the highways and backroads of the NT.

In a review in the Australian Literary Review, to which Rothwell has been a reasonably frequent contributor, Peter Cochrane damns The Red Highway with the faintest of praise.

Cochrane’s review is an exemplar of its type – fair but unstintingly and cruelly accurate.

He says that Rothwell’s book may appeal to:

“Readers who respond to a romantic, secular spirituality, who like stories laced with dream or reverie or who thrill to the idea of ‘the strange, assertive harmony of chance’…”

Cochrane nails what he sees as a fundamental flaw in The Red Highway – that Rothwell, in his search for the “truth of things” only talks to himself, or to a cohort of people that seem very much like him:

“The conversation, at times, is enjoyable to read. But the cohort does give rise to a nagging irony: surely the search for the “truth of things” in the far north must go wider than this? If wisdom resides in sameness, what is the point of travel? Is plumbing the depths of one’s own cohort as revealing as transcending those depths? Why not cast a wide net, and reach into realms and ranks, black and white, high and low, where strangeness or otherness is the spark for self-knowledge?”

The nub of his concerns is that The Red Highway contains too much “implausible nonsense”:

“The end result for this reader was distraction. I found myself wondering about the protocols of memoir — a controversial issue in recent times — and questioning the authenticity of what I was reading. I looked for endnotes that explained how such masses of conversation might have been recorded or written up, but there aren’t any.”
…
“Concocting events and conversation for dramatic purposes is not on. Rothwell is too good a writer to be doing this, no matter how marginally, and certainly not in a book aiming for some sort of deep truth through the medium of conversation on the road.”
…
“Are the literary tricks — the polishing, the inventions, the self-mythologising — all now acceptable if they happen to lead to some deeper “mystical” truth, a truth so delicate and deep it cannot be interrogated?”
…
“Now, I’ve stopped at a few roadhouses in the far north over the years and I do wish that just once I might have fallen in with a crowd as eloquent, and as good at reading faces, as this.“

I haven’t had the chance to read Nicolas’s latest book yet and confess that I’ve always had some difficulty with much of what he writes.

For mine a lot of his journalism is informed by a rather naive take on politics, an emotionless “flat-white right” version of the “latte left”. And to me his long-form work – his essays and books – often seem terribly overwritten and badly in need of an editor’s blue pencil.

That said, I admire much of what he has written about art and artists, particularly Australian Aboriginal art, and have found some of this work to be impeccably researched, written with a great interpretive eye and with an obvious love and appreciation for the artists and their works.

But – back to the long red roads of the north – if you want to see and hear another view of how life is lived in and around the great (and not-so-great) roadhouses of the NT you could do no worse than to go to the wonderful series of radio programs, called On The Roadhouse, prepared for the ABC by the NT’s own Chips Mackinolty and Andrew McMillan.

In 2002, Mackinolty and McMillan jumped in a hire car and drove the highways and backroads of the NT, on a mission to:

“…sample the steak sandwiches at every roadhouse with a 24 hour wayside inn licence in the Northern Territory. Oases of food, fuel, liquid refreshments, toilet facilities, varying standards of accommodation and ubiquitous oddities, the Territory’s roadhouses are well spread out.
Along the way, we explored aspects of life in these isolated outposts, interviewing staff and travelers and gathering the sounds of the road and the weird & wonderful creatures we encountered.”

And speaking of Andrew McMillan, Peter Cochrane is not alone in his concerns with Rothwell’s accounts of his interlocutor’s words and actions.

MacMillan was one of the lucky few to make it along to the launch of The Red Highway, where Country Liberal Party stalwarts Dave Tollner, John Elferink, Peter Murphy were in attendance, as was of course Terry “the man who may soon be King” Mills, who waxed lyrical about Rothwell’s observations of country and his ear for recording conversations.

Mills told Nicolas that “I’m sorry to say it’s not you saying it, it’s what other people have said. You have been listening generously.”

Listening to the angels perhaps?

And Andrew McMillan, who, among other things, is quoted in The Red Highway extolling the virtues of Darwin’s St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Catholic Cathedral as “a temple of art and beauty” reckons he’s never set foot in the joint.

For those who know her I don’t need to tell you that she is a careful and impassioned thinker on contemporary life and politics in the NT and beyond. For those that don’t know her, all I can say is the you are the poorer for not having the privelige of doing so.

Sometimes her clear thinking and forthright statements rub up what passes for the ‘great and the good‘ in the Northern Territory the wrong way. More power to her I say!

This piece is an excerpt from Sue’s essay, Letter from Darwin, that was published in the latest edition of borderlands, which is:

…a refereed international journal that aims to promote transdisciplinary work across the humanities, work which might also intersect with diverse practices and sites in culture, policy and everyday life. Although our beginnings are modest, we hope that over time you will be able to view writings cutting across and between politics, media, literature, history, law, science, medicine, philosophy, economics, music, film and more, along with incisive debate about contemporary culture.

Sue’s essay in borderlands examines the condition of Aboriginal people affected by the NT Intervention and analyses the ongoing implementation of the Intervention and its related spin-off projects in an all-too-rare historical context.

Letter from Darwin begins with:

The Rex Wild and Pat Anderson 2007 report Little Children are Sacred provided the first chapter of the series in this modern adaptation of a 220 year old classic that might aptly be titled ‘The Native Tribes of Australia.’ The 21st century version provides for an update of characters as well as a generous documentation on sexual abuse and women’s violence as opening scenes and pivotal parts for special task force, police, troops, medical teams, “Aboriginal experts”-both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal, but mostly non-Aboriginal. The new version of the old history of women’s violence and overall denial, indeed abuse of basic human rights is now contained in 500 pages under a misleading title termed “special measures”. The very latest and up-to-date manual on “Aboriginal legislation.”

The ultimate result has been the injection of enormous amounts of money into addressing the problems and issues that were interpreted as requiring urgent attention. This latest tilt at moral balance, after 220 years of colonisation, denial of rights and the absence of justice is just not convincing. Just as current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s symbolic rhetoric and well-rehearsed performance of apology to Stolen Generations offers promises of new beginnings and directions,
Aboriginal people, especially those at the lower end of the economic, and the rights scales, should remain highly suspicious and extremely cautious.

Sue notes at the conclusion of her essay:

Colonialism has an insatiable appetite – it is forever hungry, it can never be satisfied, and it recruits both unwitting as well as willing emissaries from the vast ranks and ever-growing number of colonised Aboriginal people. Sadly, there are those Aboriginal people who assist in the colonising of their own people as they have reconciled themselves to new arrangements and happily accept the status quo.

Perhaps Uncle Chicka Dixon was right when he named the 1970s wave of compliant natives “bourgeois blacks” and perhaps that name fits many today. While we cannot be guaranteed that central powers, at both national and state levels will not manipulate individuals or a national Aboriginal coalition of leaders, we must try something drastic if we are to survive as a People beyond the 21st century.

You can read the other contributions to the most recent volume of borderlands here and the rest of Sue Stanton’s Letter from Darwin here.

Other contributions from the current edition of borderlands, with the theme of “Acting Sovereign: Interventions in a Politics of Gendered Protectionism” include Goldi Osuri, Tanja Dreher & Elaine Laforteza ‘Acting sovereign’ in the face of gendered protectionism‘,  Nicole Watson ‘Of course it wouldn’t be done in Dickson! Why Howard’s Battlers Disengaged from the Northern Territory Emergency Response‘, Irene Watson ‘Aboriginality and the Violence of Colonialism‘, Goldie Osuri ‘(Im)possible Co-existence: notes from a bordered, sovereign present‘, Shakira Hussein & Alia Imtoual ‘A fraught search for common political ground: Muslim communities & alliance-building in post-9/11 Australia’.

Essays include Tanja Dreher,  ‘Eavesdropping with permission: the politics of listening for safer speaking spaces‘, Elaine Laforteza, ‘Speaking into safety: Orientalism in the classroom‘, Paula Abood ‘Race and the City: Series One‘

And finally the Interview with Sue Stanton, Shakira Hussein, Alia Imtoual, Nicole Watson & Goldie Osuri
‘Reflections and Insights: The Gender, Violence and Protection Workshops and Forum‘.

Enjoy!