20 February 2024 It was a select but sold out crowd that saw a great show from Emily Wurramara at the Railway Club in Darwin earlier tonight. We were all happy to see her back on stage in Darwin on a hot February night. Emily was ably supported by local duo Reverie at what for [...]
A few weeks back I went for a drive down to Batchelor, an old uranium mining town an hour’s drive south of Darwin that remade itself as a town dedicated to tourism—the wonderful Litchfield National Park is nearby—and education—the town is home to the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. Here are some photographs from [...]
In Kaytetye country the Pelican is known as walaymperre, as in Walaymperre thangkerne alkenhe arntwe arenye, repe ware elpalhapenye kape arltere. Thangkerne nyartelepe aynenke aylperre kape pwele-pwele.
Sailing Vessel Kaiwo Maru This is part 2 of what may become a multipart series … Darwin harbour is without doubt still a beautiful place. Sure, while humans and nature have both tried their best to trash the place over the past couple of hundred years – the settler society with inappropriate residential [...]
There is the promised threat of long-overdue but never-coming rain through the long months of the Gurrulwa Guligi (big wind) and Dalirrgang (build up) seasons, when pretty much every-thing and -one is stagnant with humidity, sweat and dread and when anything, nothing and everything does, can – or doesn’t and can’t – happen.
Every Australian small town has a place - or several - outside of town where the local hoons take stolen cars to lay their marks on the road in rubber. Sometimes - if the drivers have skill, a good motor and a nice new set of someone else's tyres - the marks left are almost abstract artworks. Other times, less so.
My family’s journey is but one of thousands of similar travels and travails undertaken by Stolen Generations’ members and their descendants. I follow in the footsteps of my grandparents – Bessie and Joe Senior; my father – Joe, and through the determined efforts of my mother, Dorothy, to ensure my father was reunited with his/our family. It is because of them – all gone now - that I have been able to undertake my journey, to work out where ‘home’ is for me.
Thanks to my mate Mitch Chip Childs over at the Aviators of Alice Springs Facebook page for the tip that a couple of brand spanking new Pilatus PC-21s would be passing through Alice Springs this morning en-route from their base in Switzerland to the RAAF Roulettes home at RAAF Base East Sale in Victoria. [...]
The generic gloss (non-Arandic & non-scientific) term for these brightly-coloured and drop-dead gorgeous (as food and on the eye) monitor lizards is Sand Goanna. Not very helpful when the landscape is dominated by rock and and lots ... biggest mobs in fact ... of red sand.
Empty stores and offices are sad places, full of shadows, flaked paint, dust motes and the stale smell of money no longer there.
