When things explode

Someone asked me recently what living with PTSD is like, and I found it hard to answer. Today there was a car fire/explosion in Melbourne’s CBD. I am fine. It sounds pretty awful for those involved but I am totally fine. Sort of. Suddenly I can answer the question about PTSD, though.

***

I don’t know many people who know what being in an explosion feels like. I do. And I also know what PTSD after an explosion feels like. I can’t yet say whether or not it ever goes away. It’s been 11 years so  far.

It depends a little on how tired and strung out I already am, but there’s a fairly predictable chain of physical and psychological reactions when I hear about, see, or hear an explosion:

• Adrenalin courses through my veins. An almost immediate reaction to the sudden high dose of this hormone is nausea, and - somewhat counter-intuitively - fatigue. I want to run from the apparent threat at the same time that I need to urgently lie down and sleep.
• The backs of my hands feel like they are burning. Sometimes I need to check to make sure they are not.
• The smell of singed hair tickles my nostrils. Sometimes this is accompanied by the smell of paraffin (which I find interesting, because the paraffin comes later, at the hospital, when you are safe and being treated for the burns).
• Every sound that could possibly be construed as a building crumbling around me becomes a building crumbling around me.
• For a while afterwards, every unexpected thing (bus detour, phone call, my thing not where I thought I left it, ants behaving oddly) becomes more evidence something scary is happening, triggering more adrenalin and jumpiness.
• The logical part of my brain battles with the flight or fight mode. Logic eventually wins (these days) but it can take some time and all of my concentration and attention.
• Every message along the lines of “There was an explosion … are you ok?” is both a lovely reminder of friendship and solidarity and yet another reason for my brain to focus on Exploding Things, for adrenalin to come, hands to burn...

Eventually, it passes, of course. I will be embarrassed at my erratic behaviour and ridiculous over-vigilance, but I’ll get over it.

There was an explosion in Melbourne today. I was nowhere near it and I’m fine. Whatever the reasons, I’m really sorry for the pain, shock and possible lasting trauma it will cause some people.  

I am weeding my garden, listening to very loud music, trying not to think about exploding things and hoping the pending post-adrenalin come-down means I get an excellent night’s sleep tonight.

Language, parliament, hypocrisy: Happy (belated) International Mother Language Day

February 21 was International Mother Language Day,  a day dedicated to celebrating, preserving and protecting languages of all peoples. In the week leading up to the day, media reported that, late last year, NT MLA Bess Price was told off by house speaker Kezia Purick for using Warlpiri, her first language, in Parliament.

Purick told Price “the language of the assembly is English”, although it remains to be seen where, exactly, that rule is written down. Around one third of the Northern Territory population is Aboriginal, and Warlpiri is one of the stronger NT languages, with around 3000 people still speaking it. In the NT, there is a daily ABC Radio news broadcast in Warlpiri (and another one in Yolngu Matha).

The news about Price being denied the right to speak her language came shortly after PM Malcolm Turnbull’s February 10 Closing the Gap report, which once again showed the extent to which Australian governments are failing the first people of this country. Turnbull started his speech in Ngunnawal, the language of Canberra’s Aboriginal people.

Australia: where the leader of a racist government can use a few words of an Aboriginal language while brushing over the ongoing impacts of colonisation and racism, while an Aboriginal MLA gets a dressing down for speaking her language, the language of her constituents.

September Travel Log

Number of nights away from home: 15
Number of hotels: 5
Number of flights (including connector flights): 7  
Places visited: Cairns, Bamaga, the northern-most tip of Australia (!) Yungaburra, Melbourne, Broome
Number of Australian languages worked on/with: 6

Phew, September wore me out and I am still feeling it. The trip to far north Queensland was amazing though - so I am posting some photos. One is a view of a  river joining the Gulf of Carpentaria, taken from our light aircraft, and the other is from the tip of Cape York, looking out into the Torres Strait at two small islands just over the way. 

In Bamaga, I worked with a group of sisters from a family who had been part of the  forced relocation of the Mapoon community in 1963. They now live 200km north, up on the Cape, in a new community  called "New Mapoon". You can read an article I found about that sad story here. Cape  York was  fascinating in many ways. Still thinking about it all and hoping to write something soon, but that's all for now.

August travel log

Well, August was pretty quiet. I am mentally preparing myself for September-October though, it's going to be a bit full on.

Number of nights away from home: 4
Number of hotels: 1
Number of flights (including connector flights):  6 
Places visited: Geraldton
Number of Australian languages worked on/with: 2

I know the photos of airports and hotels get a bit boring and repetitive. Believe me, I really do know. Welcome to the travelling life.
Up next, between now and December: Cape York, Cairns, Yungaburra, Melbourne, Broome, Kununurra, Mt Gambier, Melbourne. Will I see you on the road somewhere? In an airport?
Here is a picture of a famous Geraldton leaning tree (because sometimes I do some sight-seeing).

Things that happen on planes

I am exhausted after a long journey from Darwin to Geraldton, via Alice Springs and Perth…. straight through the  centre of this  massive country.

I don't know how close to my old stomping ground in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands the plane flew. Certainly it was red desert down there below us, for at least some of the flight. Anyway for some reason I suddenly remembered these three poems, written when I lived in the desert, 15 years ago.


Mail plane
- - -

Flying low over Blackstone Ranges
Plane full of strangers
But they're not even there
It's just me in the air
I could float here for ages.


Pamela
- - -

In this dry desert land
Miles from any watery place
I once saw the ocean in your eyes
As your saltwater sprayed me
And I almost drowned in your tears

The real thing
(Ode to a windmill)
- - -
I saw it once
on a hill,
alone  and still -
though it gave life to many.
And my tears blessed its rusty song
and my head spun
from the stark beauty of it all.

On phonetics & colonisation

Here is a something I wrote about how I sometimes feel about my job.  Of course I also feel like I love it, enjoy it, it's a privilege, blah blah blah but I need to hold onto this thought at all times, also.

I sat with my head inches from his
for what felt like hours
this proud young man
with tears in his eyes
watched my lips teeth tongue
he wanted me to teach him
the sounds of his language
a language silent for so long
taken away from its people
when their lands were invaded
he wanted me to teach him
the sounds. knowledge stolen from him
but somehow imparted to me
because of my education
because of my colour
he was so grateful
i was so sorry
the whole situation
felt so wrong

Skin

The bizarre intimacy of having a nurse spend hours carefully picking scabs off my face. Her face inches from mine. She would focus on my top lip, an earlobe: the burn had caused my earlobes to stick to my scalp, held there by scabby skin that slowly dried and came off, gently encouraged by the nurse.

It didn’t hurt, unless the nurse accidentally grasped a bit of not-yet-dead skin, holding on for dear life. Then the pain would make me jerk, which only made things worse.

But that didn’t happen very often. Those women were so professional. I felt totally enveloped and safe in their hands, literally.They created the perfectly calm, controlled environment I needed after the turmoil I’d been through - was, in fact, still going through. But I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was the morphine-induced bubble they let me float in, not enough to kill the pain entirely but to take the edge off. Morphine, pain, the smell of singed hair and acute awareness of skin.

I remember asking one of them if she enjoyed picking scabs as a child, and we shared a knowing smile. She confessed to enjoying this task, coming back to my earlobe every day, to see if more skin was ready to let go.

I remember the day the nurse on duty got the last bit of scab holding my earlobe to my head. I felt the lobe flap back to its  natural position, tender with new skin, exposed to the air for the first time, cold.

I remember, all too vividly, the smell of paraffin, layered thickly on my face and ears to help the healing process. I remember the taste of it, melting and running off my top lip into my mouth.

I remember thinking about my hands, wrapped up in bandages like boxing gloves for so long I felt alienated from them: what was the skin doing? How many layers had I lost? Would it grow back with webbing between  the fingers? Apparently that was a risk.

Nobody could tell me if I’d be able to use my fingers again, but we were all optimistic (or pretending to be?) about what we’d see when the bandages eventually came off. I was given exercises to do twice a day and I did them every hour, for good measure. I had plenty of time, afterall.

My hands were hidden from me long  enough to forget what they looked like. “Like the back of my hand….” I would think to myself, trying to remember it.

I remember piercing pain  if I suddenly dropped my hands to my sides and the blood rushed to them: like  the new skin under those bandages was so sensitive, so thin, it could barely contain my blood.

I have a notebook. It sat beside my hospital bed, for other people to write things down. Lists of things I needed, important phone numbers. Then suddenly one page with my handwriting: large, chunky, barely legible... scrawled with the pen held between two bandaged hands. “Day 5. Had tantrum.”

Strangely, I don’t remember the bandages coming off, just a new kind of pain afterwards. Trying not to knock my hands, with their precious new skin, against anything, trying not to touch anything too hot, too cold, too rough or sharp. Aware of the high risk of infection while I waited for my new outer layer to toughen up. Slightly obsessive about  hand hygiene now I was out of the ward and in the big dangerous world again.

And a diary entry, in almost-back-to-normal handwriting: “”I have started this new journal  because 25 days ago, on June 1, our house exploded. My other journal is in there amongst the rubble somewhere.”

Because my house exploded #2

Carl Ecke
I said goodbye to you
from across an abyss
literally
I stood in the doorway
on solid ground
and you crouched, crookedly
in your hole in the sub-floor
on bare earth, covered in dust and soot
you were cold and silent
silent is not how you were meant to be
not when you were with me
I hadn't known it would be goodbye
that the chasm
opened up when my house exploded
was to be your grave
I didn't realise you could no longer sing
ivory jammed with rubble
broken strings

Field diary fragment: some time in June, 2015

Later, in Brisbane, an afternoon off before a one-day workshop at the State Library tomorrow.

I wandered along South Bank, the “cultural precinct” and visited the Gallery of Modern Art, Indigenous collection. Somehow more moving than my usual trips to gallery – why? Felt so humbled and sort of … connected…. Seeing names of languages, places and people I have known/worked with/been to. Gija-Warmun-Galpu-Gumatj-Amata-Pipalyatjarra-Palawa-Ngarrindjeri-Gunjinku…  Like a mantra of defiance, belonging, history.  Not to mention stunning weavings and paintings and string things..

What will happen to this art, so grounded in place, in Country, if the government succeeds in driving people off their land?  Where will it go, what will it look like, what stories will it tell?

Why is it all making me so sad this week?

July travel log

We've not really been keeping this blog up to date, you might have noticed. I am trying to find a way to write about my work in a way that doesn't identify the people I work with or tell stories that aren't necessarily mine to tell. More on that when I get my head around how to do it.

In the meantime, one thing that is fairly certain and non-controversial about my job is that I spend a lot of time travelling. Maybe a fun/interesting/useful thing to do is to start trying to log that. So here I go, see how this works and I'll try to do it each month.

July travel log:

Number of nights away from home: 17
Number of hotels: 4
Number of flights (including connector flights): 6
Places visited: Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart
Number of Australian languages worked on/with: 10

Future trips
This is a suggestion from fellow travellers and friends across the country who I might run into at an airport or in transit somewhere. Obviously I'm not going to advertise my movements too specifically but if you have trips planned and think we could cross paths, get in touch and maybe we can organise to be at the same place and the same time, somewhere…. :)

Late August - Geraldton via Perth

Mid September - Cape York & Cairns

Late October - Mt Gambier via Adelaide

November - Melbourne.

That looks pretty respectable really! So - shall we do  coffee at an airport somewhere? Let me know!

Because my house exploded #1

[Here's my first piece of writing about a thing that happened in 2007. I feel there's more to come, but here's this.]

Because my house exploded
I flew through the air
Burnt hands and face and feet
The smell of singed hair

I flew into the doorway
Front door slammed on my head
A child I heard screaming
Thinking we were dead

Because my neighbour held me
Cold water bathed my skin
Wet blankets embraced me
His arms I stayed within

Because my house exploded
I lost a lot of stuff
My piano, oldest,dearest friend,
Losing it was rough

My confidence, I think, not gone,
But fairly bruised and battered
Everything I thought was safe
Was burned or lost or shattered

Home is where the heart is
It holds us, safe and warm
But when my house exploded
My whole world was torn

That was 8 years ago now
Wounds are healed and old
But still the stories surface
Wanting to be told

Because my house exploded
And that won't go away
And so I must remember
What I went through that day

A tribute to Gurrumul and his uncle, Mr Yunupingu

On June 2, Dr M. Yunupingu, former Yothu Yindi front man and Gumatj clan member, passed away at his home community of Yirrkala, in North-East Arnhem Land.

It’s often the case that we learn more about somebody’s life only after they die. As it happened, the week Yunupingu died, I had bought a copy of a beautiful new biography of his nephew, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, known more commonly just as Gurrumul.

Reading the biography, and seeing the tributes flow for Yunupingu when he died, I became acutely more aware of the role musicians such as these, bands such as Yothu Yindi, have played in the struggle for recognition, appreciation and respect for Aboriginal people, and their languages and cultures.

There is, of course, the obvious. “Treaty”, for example, catapulted the demand for recognition to an international stage. As Robert Hillman writes in the new Gurrumul – his life and music, “All these issues had been spoken of in a politely insistent way for a long time, but the Yothu Yindi people were different – louder, ruder more exuberant than anyone who’d come before them.”

But an Aboriginal musician reaching international fame, singing songs in his own language – like uncle and nephew both – that has had an impact on Aboriginal audiences that is perhaps not obvious to not-Aboriginal, English-speaking fans. Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr, another relative and Yothu Yindi band member, says that Yothu Yindi paved the way for Gurrumul’s acceptance by an international audience as a solo performer.

In Yothu Yindi, he played the drums and then the guitar and keyboards (all of which he taught himself). He was never the front man like his uncle, but widely recognised as the musical strength of the band.

When he went solo, Ganambarr explains the impact his music (performed in a number of his native Yolngu languages, with smatterings of English) had on her, and presumably not just her: “When that first solo album of his came out, I cried. [He sings in a way] that makes them appeal to a white audience. But the expressions he uses in those songs, they’re the expressions we use in traditional songs … People don’t have to know what the words mean. All that they listen to is the voice, and the impression the voice conveys. And when Yolngu listen to it, we understand every word, and the meaning of every word. It’s so powerful.”

Indeed, there is something very powerful and poignant about the international accolades being showered on a Gumatj man, singing in Galpu, Gumatj and Djambarrpuyngu – three languages that, compared to other Australian Aboriginal languages are probably quite healthy, but are still considered critically endangered.

Hillman writes that Gurrumul’s songs don’t touch on politics much – quite unlike his uncle, for example, who when he wasn’t singing “Treaty” was advocating for bilingual education and becoming the Northern Territory’s first Aboriginal principal.

But perhaps there is something inherently political about an Aboriginal musician – from the strong, proud people who famously sent the bark petition to Canberra 50 years ago -- taking his language and culture to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, to Paris and London. Writing of Gurrumul’s performance with Sting, in France 2010, Hillman writes: “The Gumatj language, the sacred repository of a culture and history older by far than that of France or any country in Europe, older than the entirety of Western civilisation, [was] about to be plaited with the younger, mongrel language of English.”

But mixed up with Hillman’s sublime observations of language and culture are light-hearted sketches of Gurrumul, down-to-earth, irreverent, utterly uninterested in fame.  The song he was meant to perform with Sting was Every Breath you Take, but “Gurrumul, relishing the swanky hotels booked for the tour … is having too much of a good time to commit himself to a whispery song with lyrics that deal ambiguously with love and longing.”

He did, in the end, do the duet, after a few frantic email exchanges between Paris and the far north Australian Elcho Island, where Gurrumul’s relatives translated Sting’s lyrics into first one, then another, of his languages, until they came up with something he was satisfied with.

Gurrumul grew up on Elcho Island, in the community of Galiwin’ku. While in recent years there has been much media focus on the conditions in Aboriginal communities, and particularly the experience of Aboriginal children there, there is something to be said for Aboriginal’s people’s approach to what the rest of us think of as disability. Gurrumul was born blind, but it didn’t hold him back: as a young one, he would ride his bike down Elcho’s famously steep hill, with family members lining the road yelling “go left! Right! Watch the pot holes!”

His family took it as given that his lack of sight would be made up for with other skills, and were not surprised when he taught himself a variety of instruments at a young age. As a left-hander, he famously plays the guitar upside-down, presumably because he had never seen it be played, so just took it as he found it and adapted to suit himself.

 His was a life seeped in an ancient language and tradition – which comes out in his music and continues to move audiences around the world to tears, although they don’t understand a word he is saying. “We come away from listening to Gurrumul with the word ‘beautiful’ on our lips”, Hillman writes, “but where that beauty comes from, its richness and complexity – that’s the wonder…

“The languages of Indigenous Australians, once numbering in the hundred, have roots in even more ancient languages … What listeners to Gurrumul’s voice and music hear is not simply ‘beauty’ but something that is the sound of life itself being honoured.” And surely, that honour is deserved, given the tenacity with which Gurrumul’s languages have survived, against the odds.

Gurrumul – his life and work, takes the reader on a whirlwind rock star tour of hotels and concert halls across Australia, Europe and the United states, as experienced by a blind man from a remote community, from one of the oldest living cultures on Earth. The story is often told from the point of view of his non-Yolngu band members and friends (as Gurrumul does not talk to journalists), who act as his some-time carers, some time cross-cultural guides.

At times verging on hilarity (he may be blind, but he adamantly refuses to wear white socks, leading to some last-minute panics), Hillman’s narrative is broken up with well-researched short essays on aspects of Yolngu language and culture, and stunning photography.

Poignantly, describing a time in 2010 when Gurrumul was dangerously ill, Hillman writes: “Any black Australian who becomes seriously ill in his late thirties has a very remote chance of reaching his late forties. A frightening number of black Australians – both men and women – lose their lives to renal failure, heart disease and liver disorders at about the age Gurrumul is now – almost thirty-nine – and many who are spared succumb ten or twenty years later.”

And so it was for Gurrumul’s uncle, fellow Gumatj, fellow trailblazer.  Mr Yunupingu was 56 years old, and he died of kidney failure.

In her June 5 obituary on The Drum, Tracy Hutchinson wrote: “I doubt there has been a more profoundly moving induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame than Yothu Yindi's last year.

And I doubt there is a more shameful indictment on us all that Mr Yunupingu died from a treatable illness in Australia in 2013. There are no cheap words to describe the magnitude of that.”

There are no words to describe it, and of course, Aboriginal people don't need words - they are living it. 

And the grieving for this particular man will last a long time. But thanks to his work, and also to technology, Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land and across the country can still watch him, painted up in ways that only they fully understand , singing "Treaty" to the world. Yunupingu's legacy is the voice and pride he gave to his people, and that legacy lives on in Gurrumul and others.

World Refugee Day Darwin

About 40 people gathered in Raintree Park, Darwin, to mark World Refugee Day on June 20.

Larrikiah woman June Mills opened the gathering with a rendition of Arafura Pearl, and an explanation of the Aboriginal practice of welcoming strangers to their land. Other speaker included Greens councillor Robin Knox, Tamil-Australian lawyer Kajaliny Ranjithkuma and Reverend Basil Schild.

A minute’s silence was held for the 62-year-old refugee from Afghanistan who was found dead at Darwin’s Wickham Point detention centre on June 15.

The rally was organised by the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network.