Finnian

I have been visiting friends Jason and Sarah in Toronto for the past week. It's such a tresure to have friends around the world who you just feel at home with. The visit was made even more special because I got to meet their beautiful son Finn. He's way too charming for his own good and is just a little bundle of wonderful. I know that the next time I see him he will be much bigger and he wont remember this visit, but I certainly will.

Finished

I have finished my research. Hooray! I wok up this morning and thought to myself "Today I dont have to ask anyone anything about Education! Today I dont have to introduce myself and explain where I come from and explain how what people are doing in this place relates to what I do. Today I dont have to convince anyone to share something of themselves so that I can learn from them." Dont get me wrong. The last 5 weeks of reasearch have been amazing. I have been to some remarkable places and met great people who have actually been very generous in what they have shared with me. I feel lucky because along the way I have made new friends. But tonight I am sleeping in the house of old friends. Friends who know me and have been part of my story for a while now. I am with people who know something of what my life was like prior to coming overseas and who know the right questions to ask. And when I go to bed I can read my book without thinking that I should be reading this academic paper or that historical account. And tomorrow when I wake up I will be on holidays.

Canada

I'm in Canada now. I spent a long day travelling from Alaska to Vancouver and stayed only about 4 days in British Columbia. That definitely was not long enough as it is a really beautiful area. The drive from Vancouver up to the Okanagan Valley was a real treat and at times we were driving above the tree tops.
Edmonton has been less pictoresque but the friendliness of the people here has more than made up for it. I have had some great days visiting schools and reservations and meeting people from many of the different First Nations, Metis and Inuit groups here in Western Canada.
My research finishes at the end of this week and the hoiday begins. Yay!

Leaving Alaska

Alaska is an improbable place. It is vast and rugged and cold. It has unreachable mountains and frozen seas, rivers and lakes. It has a capital city which cannot be reached by road - only by air or sea. It has a temperature swing of 150 degrees (F). But still there is life here. There is amazing wild life such as I may never see again. There is a remarkable history of the first inhabitants of this place, the Inupiaqs, the Athabascans, the Yupiaq, the Aluets, and all of the other groups that make up the 20 language groups of Alaska. They showed repect and love of the land and trusted that they would be given what they needed to survive the cold hard winters. And survive them they did developing along the way an amazing collection of stories and knowledge about the cylce of life in the frozen North. Then there are those who live there now. The 'outsiders' who most often come from somewhere else but have grown to love their new home and have undertaken great feats of engineering to make the hard to reach places easier to reach. They are the ones who thought to build a tunnel directly through a mountain that takes 10 minutes to drive through. They are the ones who have built bridges so that traintracks and roads could be laid. They are the ones who have seen to the development of airports and shopping centres and oil pipelines to ensure economic 'progress' in Alaska. Rightly or wrongly they too have their place in this place.
I dont know that I could live here. It is too 'other' for me. The mountains are too high and everything is too white. The seasons are too stark and the differential between day and night, light and dark, summer and winter is too much for me to want to adjust to.
I'm sure that people would say the same about where I live. Maybe that's why I understand why, improbable a place as it is, people yearn for Alaska and call it home.

Wildlife

Spent my last two days in Alaska on the Kenai Penninsula. A very differnt landscape and atmsphere there than it was in the interior. The mountains are even bigger, and I didn't think that was possible. They are majestic and awe inspiring and somehow beyond the realms of my imagination.
Once I arrived in Seward, the seaside town that was my base for the two days, the highlight was a Whale and wildlife boat cruise around Resurrection Bay. We saw a pair of Humpback whales aswell as sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles, mountain goats and all manner of sea birds. It beggars belief how they al manage to survive in that environment during the bleak winters. I think the whales have the right idea. They spend the winter in Hawaii and the summer in Alaska!
I was literally surorunded by absolute beauty for the length of the cruise and it was almost overwhelming - almost!

Howard

I just got back from Howard's camp. I had to walk on water to get there! Howard Luke is an Athabaskan man who lives up river from Fairbanks about 10 miles. His camp is cut off from the mainland by the Chena river which freezes over in the winter. You can walk the half mile across the river to get to his camp when the ice is thick, or in the summer you can get across there in a boat. There's a flag you can raise at the landing to show Howard you want to come over and visit and he will come over in his boat to pick you up. Traversing the river today was touch and go as the weather is getting warmer and the ice is breaking up. Howard is a highly respected Senior Elder of the local community. One of the local schools has been named after him. He has written his own book telling his life story of growing up in the Athabaskan way and he still lives a traditional life of hunting and fishing in his camp where he lives by himself. He is a modern traditional man. He knows how to hunt moose, smoke fish, trap beaver and build a sweat lodge. He also has two snow machines, a solar powered cell phone and an outboard motor boat. He was kind enough to show me around his camp and tell me a bit about his life growing up in Alaska. What a great morning and how cool to have walked across a frozen river.

Lines of desire

Apparantly those little well trodden paths that shorten the distance between A and B are called "Lines of Desire". Instead of following the designated footpath or road, people see where they want to get to and make their own way in that direction in the most direct way possible. As the snow has been melting here I have seen the evidence of lots of desire lines. Sometimes I feel like my journey through life is like a line of desire. It's as if there are these well established paths that most of the people in the world seem to be on, but my desire is leading me somewhere else. I can see where I want to go and am having to tread my own path to get there.

Different landscape, same themes

Here in Alaska my focus is on learning about a group called the Alaskan Native Knowledge Network and the work they are doing to create 'place-based' learning where what students do in school grows out of the community they come from. It has already been an amazing few days of talking to new colleagues about their journey so far, their successes, their struggles and the things that keep them going. So many conversations have included genuine acknowledgement of just how similar our two contexts are. Strange to think that two places, two peoples so far apart geographically could be so similar in so many ways. But then if you think about it, it's not so strange. Native Alaskans and Indigenous Central Australians both live in harsh environements where surivival id difficult and you depend on your family, your community to look after you. In both cases contact with Europeans has led to disease, death, missions, loss of culture and language. In both cases the people have had to fight to regain control over their traditional lands - the core of their being and sense of self. In both cases knowledge is passed on through the telling of stories and the experiential learning gained through hands on activities such as hunting. All of this just makes me feel at home here, and feel a sense of kinship with the people I have met so far. Their ways are familiar to me.

Athabaskan creation story

A train through Alaska

There are no words to describe how beautiful the journey from Anchorage to Fairbanks was. I will simply offer you some photos and suggest that you click on the 'my photos' link on the side to see even more.

Anchorage

Anchorage is a town built on extraction of things. On every street corner of downtown is a fur trader, a jade shop or an ivory shop. The presence of the trans Alaskan Oil pipeline is ubiquitous. If you aren't involved in extracting something then you likely work in the tourist industry. Strangely the month I have decided to visit is the inbetween seasons. Tourists dont really start coming to Alaska until May. The first cruise ship arrives on the 13th of May. A visit to the Alaskan Mueum of Art and History details the strong links with Siberia and Russia. The West Coast of Alaska is less than 3 miles from Russia and once upon a time a land bride existed conecting the two lands. It is thought that all of the Americas were originally populated via this bridge. In a typically non-indigenous approach to land, the Russians who had a controlling trade interest in Alaska decided to sell Alaska to the United States for 7.2 million dollars. Staggering!
The day I spent wandering the quiet streets, locals were excited because the local Hot Dog stand had ventured out for the first time this year. His arrival seemed to officially mark the start of the thaw, the start of Spring. No less than 4 people suggested I should try on eof his hot dogs. have to admit, they were good.

Out of my element

I was nervous all day yesterday. I was finally going to Alaska. I had been talking about it for a long time and it always sounded so exotic as the name escaped my mouth. Alaska....For resaons known only to United Airlines, I had to fly from Seattle through Denver to get to Anchorage. That would sort of be like flying from Sydney to Alice Springs to get to Melbourne! So a journey that could have taken me about two hours took the whole day. Never mind. I dont mind airports and being in transit gives me space to read and write to people and email. But sitting for a few hours in Denver airport as the snow fell outside and flight after flight was delayed gave me time to think about my destination - Alaska. It gave me pause to think that if it was cold here in Denver then it was going to be even colder in Anchorage, and colder still in Fairbanks where I will spend 2 weeks. I started to worry that it would be so cold it might actually hurt. What if the whole experience, instead of being exotic and wonderful was just a painful epic of frozen nose hair and numb toes? And as we taxied out in our plane and they de-iced the wings with something that looked decidedly environmentally unfriendly, I thought 'Oh my God, there's a possiblilty that the wings could freeze and we could crash!' I NEVER have those thoughts when I fly. I'm a good flyer. Then miraculously we took off, didn't crash and in fact made it safely all the way to Anchorage. I realised at some point during the flight that the reason I was so nervous all of a sudden was that snow and cold are really not my element. In fact if you consider that the desert is my element then Alaska is about as far away from my element as I can get. Then I realised another crucial thing, people in the Northern hemisphere live like this all the time. They live in this cold, and much colder. They have to de-ice planes on a regular basis. They live and work and drive and go shopping in snow for half the year. And what do you know, I arrived in Anchorage, walked outside to catch a taxi and my nose hair did not, in fact, freeze. It was cold but the taxi driver was celebrating the fact they had had 5 consecutive days without snow fall. Alaskans are celebrating the arrival of Spring. I needn't worry.

Northern Exposure

Those of you who know me well will know how much I love the TV show Northern Exposure. Imagine then my excitement when given the chance to 'visit' Cicely, Alaska?! The show was filmed in small town outside of Seattle caled Roslyn. My friends Kyrie and Nate were kind enough to take me to visit and I was so excited I was literally skipping down the main street. The fantastic thing is that the makers of the show basically used the street scape as it existed so most of the buildings are still there - The Brick, Ruth Anne's store, Joel's office and the Roslyn Cafe mural. I went into Joel's office, which is now a giftstore for all things Northern Exposure, and in some strange twist of something the store owner was watching Crocodle Dundee!

Still like the desert

I am missing the desert. I miss the space and the stillness and the quiet. I feel closed in and crowded and deafened by the city. I sat in a park today near the hospital, telling myself I was doing some reading for my course, but in reality most of the time I was just sitting. For the first time in a while I carved out a little patch of grass and enjoyed the grass and the sky and the wind. But unfortunately even in the lovely gardens of East Melbourne, the city eventually reinforces it's presence upon you and the cars and ambulances and helicoptors break your reverie.
I met a man recently and was immediately attracted to him. There's nothing immediately obvious about why I would be attracted to him. I haven't exchanged more than 20 words with him. I think it is his quiet that I find appealing. He seems still and uncluttered. He feels like the desert. The desert that has been my constant companion for so many years.
I wonder if I will ever feel that same sense of longing for the city?

Pram people

The entire world seems to be being overrun by pram people. Babies are the new must have accessory and let me tell you I’m over it! It’s not that I have anything against the babies themselves, or the parents either for that matter. It’s more the all pervading attitude society takes with regards to the rights and privileges that go along with pram ownership.
Let me give you some examples. The other day I went swimming at a local public pool. It was during the late morning so, not unexpectedly, any number of children from the local Primary school were having swimming lessons. Both the change rooms and the pools were overrun by wild, screaming, giggling children. Fair enough, kids should learn how to swim. No problem there. I decided to go from the pool to one of my favorite cafes to have a quiet lunch and read the paper. Delighted to find the place not busy I settled myself at one of the larger tables so that I could spread the paper out and read it cover to cover. Just after my food and coffee had been delivered to me some pram people arrived. Now I must point out at this point that there were any number of other tables available in the café, however, I was asked to move tables so tat this couple and their one child could have the bigger space. They of course had a pram. Not that the child was at any time in the pram. They seemed to bring it along just in case!
Example number two also finds it’s setting in a café, this time one in Brunswick St where I was making use of their free wireless broadband. I had ordered my lunch special pasta and glass of wine and was engrossed in my emails when an ear piercing screech eminated from a nearby toddler. The person dispatched to deal with the screaming child could have been no more than 12 or 13. ‘Could this be the father?’ I wondered in dismay. It took some minutes of continual screaming before anyone else decided to take responsibility for the situation. Finally the mother arrived on the scene and made some excuse about the toddler being tortured by his older brother. If this had been the end of the incident I perhaps would not have been bothered. The trouble really began when the two mothers in that party, both with prams, paid their bill and left the café just before me and decided to head in the same direction as me. Now as many of you will know or imagine, footpaths along Brunswick St are not that wide in fact they are almost exactly the width of two prams side by side! I know this because it took me some minutes to navigate my way around them and even when I excused myself indicating that I needed to pass, the eyeball rolling and exasperated sighs that I, an insignificant pedestrian, should wish to inconvenience the almighty pram people!
And finally and perhaps most disturbing of all was the presence of a pram at the pub the other night. It was well after 9:30 at night and my friend and I watched in horror as a toddler was allowed to roam freely around often lingering near a door that was opening frequently. The poor little thing was almost beside herself with tiredness but her parents seemed to value their Friday night social life over their childs’ need to sleep.
I know that it is important to create child friendly spaces in our world, but can we agree that there are some spaces that are just inappropriate for kids?

Cancer

It’s a scary word right? It has all of these connotations straight away. It’s one of the biggies, one of the things we are scared of. My brother has cancer. In fact he was similtanously diagnosed with two separate, unrelated cancers. The first one was bad but fixable. The second one is bad. It’s aggressive and it’s rare. Only a few patients get this type of cancer in Australia each year. It’s in his lymphatic system. Before this I couldn’t have told you anything about the lymphatic system. Now I can tell you where it is, what it does and what goes wrong when cancer is found there. I can tell you how they treat it. I can tell you what happens to your body when they treat it. I can tell you about the side effects of chemotherapy and the possible risks involved in having you immune system intentionally decimated. None of this is knowledge I ever wanted to have but it’s amazing how quickly you can learn about something. It’s amazing how motivated you can become to understand words like neutropenic, haemoglobin, and methotrexate and mabthera. It amazing how familiar a place can become – like a hospital you didn’t know the address of before becomes a place you visit every day. And the people you meet there, the doctors and nurses and other patients, become this strange little community to you – like people thrown together on a cruise ship, only without the drinks with umbrellas in them! And it’s strange how even though you feel tired and don’t know how you will summon the energy to make the journey in again, you still find yourself looking for a car park, or at the train station because you cant bear to think of your brother lying there by himself in a hospital, unable to do the simplest things like brush his teeth because his mouth is full of ulsers. And you get there and he is relieved to have the company and be reminded that he is not going through this alone.
And then you find yourself agreeing to be the one who stays with him in between treatments, because somehow you are the natural person to do that. And even though that means checking his temperature every four hours and making sure he takes his medication when it is due and worrying when you see him pale, or sweaty or lethargic, you do it because you can do nothing else. Because it is the only thing you can do to ease this journey he is on.
And I am sure in a few years, when he is well, and we look back on this time it will not feel as scary or as tiring or as unfair as it seems now. Am I sure? I am hopeful

The best laid plans

How does that saying go again?
I am a planner. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what makes me good at my job and good at maintaining friendships and good at travelling. I can organise things and I can organise myself.
I had a great plan for this year, my year off. I was going to have a rest, a holiday for the first couple of months. I was going to spend some time in Perth, then move in with a friend in her fabulous new apartment for a couple of months. I was going to ease into my study, I was going to create a nice little routine when I took my reading to cafes and lived the inner city life for a few months. I would catch up with friends, I would swim everyday. I would spend time with my nephew and then in march I would go overseas. After my fabulous journeys I would return to Melbourne and spend the final six months working out if this city was somewhere I could live again.
It was a good plan.
The day after I arrived back in Melbourne things went decidedly pear shaped (see post entitled ‘cancer’).
The problem with being a planner is that when the plan hits a wall you still want to make the plan work somehow –because it was a good plan and you had worked hard to organise it. And the more you try to resist the tangent your life has taken the more frustrated and disheartened you become that your plan is gone now. And it’s not that you don’t want to be doing what you are doing now, in fact under the circumstances you are doing exactly what you need to be doing.
I just wish the circumstances were different. I’m sure I’m not the only one!

Farewells, snakes and late night hunting

Last night was my farewell from Mulga Bore as well as being our usual end of term celebration. Robyn who I work with at the school had put a lot of time and effort into planning a few surprises for me but there are some things you just can’t plan for!
We had gathered outside as it was a very balmy evening and let’s face it that mob would rather be outside than in pretty much anytime. We had just finished handing out all of the certificates to outstanding students and had given everyone a copy of the new Utopia School CD which we are all very proud and every one was very excited about. We had finally settled all the kids down and Robyn had just launched into her very serious and moving speech about me and my time at Mulga Bore when what should I see slithering along the ground towards us but a very small, very fast snake! I pointed it out to Violet who was sitting beside me 2 seconds later the entire 150 people, men women and children had scattered and begun to climb trees, verandahs and each other to escape from the snake. Admittedly Violet and I were the only ones who had seen the size of the snake and once people realised it wasn’t a major threat one of the old women casually walked over and thumped it with a large lump of wood. That crisis averted, we moved everyone inside, just to be safe, and started the speeches again.
What followed was one of the most special hours of my life. The outpouring of love and pride and sorrow at my departure was truly humbling and many tears were shed. The kids had decorated the classroom with signs and paper chains and they had all written little thankyou cards which they presented to me one at a time while shaking hands to say goodbye. The shaking of hands in the indigenous world is a custom usually reserved for ‘Sorry business’, usually when someone dies. While last night was actually a happy celebration in many ways of the relationship I have built with the people of Mulga Bore, there was certainly a lot of grief about it too. The community teachers and adults had a chance to speak too and their effort to express complicated emotions in a language that is hard for them was really touching. Speeches were followed by a Community BBQ and a disco with matt and Kelly from Music Outback doing the musical honours.
Finally at about 9:30pm the evening wrapped up and it was time for me to drive some people and myself home. We were in convoy with another car from 3 Mile community (one of my pick up points) and, predicatably, something went wrong! They got a flat tyre. Luckily they had a spare. You can’t always count on that! Unfortunately the spare was not as inflated as it could have been so we were reduced to driving quite slowly for the 50 or so kms home. Fortunately this meant that when the other car hit a kangaroo were were going slowly enough to avoid hitting it. This also meant that were were going slowly enough to stop and have someone grab it before it limped away. This task fell to Angela who was travelling in the front seat. She fairly leapt out of the car and quick as a flash grabbed onto the tail. The kangaroo, sensing perhaps the fate that awaited him, struggled to free himself from Angela’s grip. At this point Angela decided to call for back up, specifically ME! So I did my bit, jumped out of the car and I too grabbed hold of the tail. Then the cries came from the back of my car ‘Hit it in the head!’ I should say at this point that the kangaroo had been injured when the car struck it and could no longer hop. Out here that leaves you with one option – Ker (meat). So Lachlan, one of my students joins us on the road with a great big tree stump in hand and proceeded to thump the poor old kangaroo on the head a couple of times. I have to admit I turned away at this point, but I was still holding onto the tail. The Ker was then tossed into the back of the other car and we got underway again.
It’s hard to convey the mood in the car after this unexpected hunting activity, but it’s fair to say it was light. People were happy. They had had a good night with all the families together, a BBQ, a disco and now they had tomorrow’s breakfast all lined up. Maybe it doesn’t get much better than that?
It was such a great night and one which in so many ways reflected all the things I love about being out here. I found myself struggling to remember the reasons why I had decided to leave.

Last times

Today was my last Monday at Mulga Bore. Tomorrow will be my last Tuesday. On the weekend as I drove back out to Utopia from Alice Springs I realised that it would be the last time I would drive back to Utopia. Of course I'm being melodramatic. It might not be my last time doing any of these thiings. I might end up back out here. But nothing is sure. I guess if I think about it I have been experiencing Last Times for a while now - last winter in the desert, last time at Ti tree Sports, last Christmas concert, last time wrapping Christmas presents for 50 kids (not so sad about that one!), last hunting trip, last time listening to bad country/gospel music, last time making fritz sandwiches (not too sad about that one either!!) Maybe the noting of Last Times is our way of making sure the passing of a significant moment doesn't pass us by? As we were cleaning the school today and I was joking around with my Senior girls one of them said to me suddenly 'Lisa stop'. I have heard this phrase before, usually when I'm driving the car and someone see's a goanna crossing the road, but the tone was different this time. I said to her 'stop what?'. 'Stop here' she replied, 'Dont go'. 'But I have to go and have a rest' was all I could think to reply, quickly adding 'I might come back'. 'You wont' she answered with the voice of someone who has been promised such things before and been let down. And my heart broke a little bit. And I wonder to myself why I'm not 'stopping'?
Last times are hard. Leaving is hard.

Paintings

I bought a painting this morning. It's bright and abstract and colourful and I'm not sure yet if I like it. My friend Lucy painted it. She called in at the school office looking for someone who wasn't here. Lucy was perhaps the first Indigenous woman I got to know at Utopia. She comes from a place called Aniltji and I was the school teacher there for a term when I first arrived out here. When I first met Lucy she was almost completely deaf. She wasn't born that way. She made the mistake of marrying a man who drank, alot, and became violent against those around him when he was drunk. Often Lucy copped the brunt of his rage in an effort to keep him away from their children. He had beaten her so many times around the head that she had practically lost hearing in both ears. I remember one time seeing Lucy in town, literally sitting in a gutter. I sat down with her and we talked a bit. She used to get very frustrated by how little she could understand in conversations. What I remember about that time was the palpable sadness I felt sitting next to her. Here was this proud strong woman who had literally been beaten into submission. The day I saw her she was in fact on her way to Adelaide to have an operation on her ears. I cannot believe the transformation it has made to her life. She still struggles to hear some things but can hold a normal conversation if you speak clearly to her. She is painting again (her main source of income) and she is back living on her country with her children around her. She is happy again. I remember seeing here a few months back and we talked about that time I saw her in town. She just shook her head and said 'I was really sad that time, but now I'm good, I feel strong'. It was this strong Lucy who visited this morning, talking excitedly about the sports weekend on at a neighbouring community and how she needed to sell a painting to get fuel for her car to get her family up there. So I bought one of them, because while other people will come to my house and see it as a piece of decoration for my wall, I will always look at it and think of my friend Lucy.