The place I live is a strange one, and I’m sure at least one of you is interested in where I am and what it’s like. Unfortunately, a place like this is not conducive to blogging or any kind of sequential narrative, not merely for the fact that my internet access is sporadic and hurried. It is a place where a seemingly uneventful day is revealed to be full of the bizarre occurrences, unique people and nebulous cultural challenges that pass for ‘normal’ here. At the end of every day I find myself confused about something, be it permits, kinship networks, royalties, ownership, education, health, language or even the nature of my job itself. My life here largely consists of slowly trying to piece together the various, often conflicting, pieces of information that I am barraged with hourly. There is sadly no Gunbalanya Handbook. If there was, I imagine it would be thick and confusing enough that it would resemble the Complete Works of Dostoyevsky in Russian and as a result of little use to me. There is a book on Kunwinjku Language that I own, but one look at the diagram explaining skin relationships resulted in my head exploding, so it gathers dust and I muddle through using my limited but concentrated experience. All this serves as a preface to say that what follows is going to be more a set of general observations than a diary or story, as each crazy day melds with the next. Half the time I don’t even know what bloody day it is.
The Basics
I live in an indigenous community in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Arnhem Land was set aside as an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931 and has continued as such, despite various efforts by government and large corporations to mine the shit out of it. As a result, you need a permit to enter Arnhem Land, something you do by way of a crocodile-infested tidal river that can only be crossed in a car at certain times of day. Obviously, I have a permit to live and work here for the duration of my contract, after which I have to bugger off.
Gunbalanya officially has about 1000 residents, but this figure is wildly inaccurate, given the rate of movement between the community, various outstations (tiny communities in the most brain-addlingly stunningly picturesque arse end of nowhere that generally consist of 4 houses, an airstrip and an improbable number of dogs) and of course, every long-grass drinker’s paradise, Darwin. The main language spoken is Kunwinjku – pronounced ‘Gunwingu’ – which, for a language that was supposedly transcribed phoenetically by linguists, is absolutey impossible to understand in its bizarre written form. Gunbalanya, for example, is often written Kurnballarnjaja (for fuck’s sake). Nice work, guys.
The town is bound on one side by a large billabong that in the wet season joins up with the flood plains to encircle the town and effectively make it an island only accessible by plane. The billabong is home to an innumerate number of kinga (the pronunciation of which, most hilariously, is ‘ginga’), the Kunwinjku word for nasty-as-fuck, man-eating, enormous saltwater crocodiles; as well as long-necked turtles (great tucker), barramundi and every type of waterfowl you could imagine from egrets to whistling kites, brolgas, sea eagles, curlews and jabirus. I feel a particular affinity with the jabiru, whose legs are so long and awkward that is does nothing at all with the grace and poise of the other birds and is hilariously uncoordinated when it takes off or lands. I share the dry land with a less endearing menagerie of frogs, cockroaches, cane toads, snakes of various species, spiders, green ants, rarely sighted buffaloes and wild pigs and of course, the ubiquitous camp dogs. More on them later.
Also surrounding the town are three rocky outcrops separated from the larger Arnhem Land escarpment – Injalak, Arguluk and Nimbambirr. Injalak hill constitutes the richest and most concentrated rock art site in the world, containing ‘galleries’ in which the paintings are anything from 20,000 to 20 years old. It’s all pretty picturesque. All the houses near the billabong are on stilts, the roads are dusty red and the community is peppered with palms, eucalyptus and the odd termite mound. It is a beautiful place.
