The story deals with women harassed by men. However the painting’s subject is centred on the ascension of the women to the rank of stars. Their metamorphosis sublimes their deed to deliberately refuse the status of a permanent victim and act in consequence … In these paintings, there are neither stars nor women.

While I’m prob’ly not black enough for the likes of Andrew Bolt and Bess Price, I’m damn certain I’m still not white enough for the rest of you. Half-breeds like me, we’re still pawns in the middle of a big, nasty, lateral violence fueled discourse, led by self-interested types with ulterior motivations. And that’s why I fight.

At the time I came to the conclusion that the ‘cooling-off place’ had been designed by the same architect that had designed Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. The several strands of barbed-wire at the top of the chain-wire mesh fence, the padlocked chain on the gate and the spotlights surrounding the Spartan building are reminiscent of TV images I had seen during the time that David Hicks was receiving similar consular assistance from the Australian Government as Julian Assange is currently receiving.

UPDATED – Now with added Gerry Wood! That’s not all! Just next to this rubbish dump there is an open sewerage pond where the raw sewage is pumped out straight of the houses. It is just very rough and ready – a hole in the ground surrounded by a chain-mesh fence. Pure raw sewage. The tip is about 2 or 3 minutes drive from the community. Kids walk back and forth. Dogs can get into the sewage ponds and then they go back to the community. It is a disgrace.

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.

Pornography Drop-off Point. “This one is at the airstrip and is one of a pair. The other one is at the entrance to Yuendumu near the patronising “Look for People” sign. We inspect the bins daily. So far nothing has been placed in them. Anything we recover from the bins, we will incinerate.”

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.

3 days in the southern Tanami desert in November