Being out in the desert at night is a pleasure. Wandering along the sandy path, we enjoyed the spectacle. Dad said, "What would happen if someone was lost in this field at night?" One of the workers said, “There was a pack of dingoes bothering some of the people,” he said.
Read MoreThat sounds mad. But for a while now I’ve quietly believed that rocks have consciousness. It’s not that I hear gravel crying when I walk on it, but rocks do speak to humans, albeit in their own way.
Read MoreThe stage was a plateau of red sand under a starry night. People sat on the ground around fires that warmed them. A set of headlights lit the stomping ground stage. Performers were painted up in the dark behind bushy mulga trees.
Read MoreI can’t say that I know how it would feel to have the small purchase I have on this world blown away by a fierce wind, to have your house torn up as if it were made of wet cardboard.
Read MoreI’ve learned a thing or two, but sometimes there’s a moment. A moment when I realise that the emergency won’t be deflected, that the patient’s pressing need — the threat to life or limb — won’t be met or rationalised away or quickly ameliorated.
Read More“It looks like a school of tiny fish or plankton,” I said. The pulsing mass extended all the way to the ground from the tall brightly lit pole. “It looks like a snowstorm,” said C. Every 50 metres or so, another column of multitudinous specks towered in the surrounding desert darkness.
Read MoreA special snake created the landforms, rivers and lakes, mountains and reef. The entire landscape of earth was made from her body. She communicates now through the rainbow, her giant colourful body having been consumed in the world’s creation.
Read MoreThere was a spiral staircase up the clock tower where I would meet my beau for kisses at lunchtime. I put a satirical poster of Ronald Reagan (the demented Hollywood actor who threatened to launch the nuclear war) on the wall next to my office desk and felt quite at home.
Read MorePleasure in babies and young things is natural in humans in all stages of life. In many of the Indigenous cultures, including the local ones here, child-raising was the norm for grandparents before the British came. Young people were good at having children, but not necessarily good at raising them.
Read MoreI heard about an Aboriginal man in Central Australia whose totem was the fly. I have friends related to the crocodile, a fierce and unpleasant creature, but undeniably powerful. I felt sorry for a man whose totem was a fly. It was such a pest. How could you make a relationship with that insect?
Read MoreAboriginal women of this region have the prerogative of living much of their lives without bras or any other corsetry. They let their bodies grow as they will, although you can tell a woman is going to town because she might be plucking at her little bush beard with tweezers absent-mindedly while talking to you
Read MoreA spindly-limbed lizard sped up the fly screen on the door. It was the type that gets up and runs on its back legs when the ground gets too hot to touch. The lizard’s deftness reminded me that many plants and animals thrive in the desert heat. There is a sweet spot for them, somewhere within the scorching temperatures .
Read MoreThe waterhole surrounded by rock carvings is not marked for people to visit. There is no reference to the millennia of art, learning and healing there. It is nothing but a miner’s project now. They will smash it all up.
Read MoreI help my father-in-law gather buckets of apples. They’re crisp and sweet, the first crop of decent apples from a tree he planted twenty years ago. The tree has survived years of hatred and resentment and being dismissed as useless, to bring a bounty of exceptional fruit.
Read MoreI was exposed to a lot of people who had never seen dreadlocked hair up close. “I see, it’s a hat!” said one nurse looking closely at my braided locs. Another told me that she told her children to brush their hair or they would end up looking like me.
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“I know not to wear the red, y’know. Where I’m from in Queensland we love to wear it, but I understand the men here don’t want you wear it. So I don’t.”
My first response was to bridle. How could a culture ban a colour? Especially such a powerful and energising colour?
Read More“It’s the nature of medicine. They’re hurt and we learn,” he said, looking over his reading glasses.
“I reckon when you’re an intern they should just give you a patient to kill and get it over with. As a doctor, you’re going to make a mistake and someone will die. It’s just a matter of time.”
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“If Europeans could build a pressurised metal tube that carries us through the air, why wouldn’t Aboriginal people make similar advances in knowledge?
Aboriginal people were talking and travelling and lying under bright stars. Is it impossible that they created a body of knowledge that encompassed astral travel as an aspect of healing?”
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“We’re med students, Matty. We get every disease we study. I thought I had porphyria last week, only because I’d eaten beetroot.”
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So, without Thunghutti, I made up my own language to sing to the land. At my feet was a piece of milky quartz. I could make out the shape of a head and some kind of body — a fierce bird. Asking permission, I dug the stone out.
Read MoreSlot Canyon photograph in banner by Sebastian Boguszewicz
Creative Writing by Dr. Janelle Trees
Photo: Claudia Jocher
I'm a doctor of Aboriginal descent living and travelling with my photographer wife, Claudia. I see myself as a bridge between 'races' and cultures, gay and straight, the child and the crone, arts and sciences. I am inspired by Nature, including humans in all our splendid individuality.
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