Polite society

The view from my window. [Northern Rivers]

Working in the Northern Territory is a much different experience to travelling there for a holiday.

 I count myself fortunate to have worked up there years ago. The land claimants I got to know were elderly, and many were in poor health. It gave us a purpose that kept the blood pumping, driving on dirt roads for 16 hours a day and sleeping beside croc infested waterways. 

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I was finally heading home, looking forward to a proper shower and a fresh bed, tired and hungry with my only accompaniment a blinking reserve fuel tank light. I hadn’t seen my son for a week. So I combined the two things on my mind, thinking I’ll refuel and get him a treat, and I pulled into a Katherine roadhouse.

In those days there weren’t as many people you see nowadays crossing the streets and the footpaths, that you would now keep your eyes peeled for as they come out of the darkness. It was a quiet, starlit, temperate Dry evening.

The roadhouse worker had taken the opportunity to get the mop out, and I’d tippy-toed across the floor. I could see my reflection in the fridge door – it wasn’t even worth smoothing my hair down.

And somewhere during my payment for roadhouse food I heard the door open behind me, and in seconds the woman on the till looks over my shoulder and says, in a conversational tone,

‘Nancy, don’t walk there, I just mopped’.

Just an everyday comment you might hear anywhere. But I glanced over my shoulder. There were four behind me but I could take a guess at who was Nancy – and her blood was dripping onto the freshly washed floor. I didn’t work in Indigenous health for another ten years, and not as a health practitioner, but to my untrained eye, Nancy appeared to have sustained an injury to the face and was holding her jaw together with both hands. She dropped her head and someone stood aside as she exited.

By the time I got outside she was being attended to, and I sat in my dusty 4wd and watched the night patrol help her into the back of their wagon, telling her to keep the pressure on the wadding. 

On the state of Indigenous health in the NT, most stats are not pretty and you have to look for them, and then put your mind to thinking ‘how exactly do people get those types of injuries’. Broken eye sockets, shattered jaws, traumatic brain injuries, scalds to the entire head. Being stabbed in the heart would be a clean death.

When people lament the breakdown of social cohesion and the unpalatable nature of today’s public discourse, I would have to agree. People say and write some ugly things these days. 

Every Dry, when tourists and nomads roll through the spectacualr landscape, public drunkenness in the NT became a hot issue as alcohol management measures became embedded and mandatory rehabilitation orders were proposed.

A busy time for roadhouses.  I saw a roadhouse attendant politely and with friendly eye contact make what was to her, a reasonable request that a woman not drip blood on her floor. And this hospitality was with barely a break between serving customers, the tourists and town-based locals who barely seemed to notice. How quickly they become blind in both eyes.

A writing exercise – Tex & Nellie

When people say they speak English, yes some remote people do. And when you get an ear for it, you should expect to be able to be having exchanges in English in about 3 months. Up till then I identified myself as ‘sorry?’ with a head tilt.

But I always understood Tex and Nellie because they had perfect missionary English.

They wanted to go see one of their sites – they hadn’t been there for years, they kept asking me, so one day I agreed to take them for a drive. Three hours later and we are driving down a dirt road, me gingerly as there was still a lot of water around even though we were a month into the Dry. It would be weeks before it was completely dried out. 

And we came to a section where to my eye it looked to be a foot or so under water.

Even though I wasnt a local, I know what rain does to the fine grade red dirt up that way.  “I’m not sure about this.”

They both looked at my snorkel, then at me, then back ahead.

I could see by the state of edges where water had receded, indicated the water had laid there for some time. “That looks like it’ll be real soft.”

“Go, go” said Nellie helpfully, sitting forward in the middle of the front bench.

Old Tex tightened his grip on the ceiling hand grip.

So I edged a little closer.

“No! Faster, faster girl”.

So I went slower, then stopped. I had no 2-way, no sat phone, just thousands of miles of empty country and two elderly traditional owners.“I’m checking it”, I said and hopped out.

Two, three paces in and I was stuck, my boots encased in mud concrete. Tex and Nellie laughed as I staggered out of the mud, then walked wide legged back to the 4wd.

I said ‘no way’.

They laughed good naturedly. Then I did a 17- point turn on a narrow track and headed back to town.

At some point I said to the two old people, ‘we wouldn’t have made it through.’

Tex agreed, ‘too soft.'

Nellie backed him up,’ But we know the short cut, we could have walked out.’

‘How long to walk out?’ I asked, not knowing the country having only moved from down south less than three months before.

‘Six weeks,’ said Tex.

Nellie nodded in agreement,”We know where all the tucker is.”

Six weeks. Oh, funny.