Welcome in 2009

Well,  I spent the first hours of the new year in Alice Springs Emergency Department in my role as sexual assault counsellor, a small part of the health system picking up the fallout from the partying and drinking of new year celebrations. I didn’t see any fireworks, unlike the previous 10 years. I finally got to bed at 7:30 am and spent most of the rest of the morning sleeping, apart from a few interruptions to wish me happy new year in my half asleep state (thanks Mum and Keith, I know you love me!) I eventually got up and did my usual yoga/ meditation and started the washing. I ate a very leisurely breakfast (or was it lunch?) on the verandah as amazingly it is not too stinking hot to sit outside (unlike last January). In between the washing I managed to read Germaine Greer’s latest essay called “On Rage” (thanks, Mil for giving it to me).  Some very interesting thoughts about why there is so much drinking and violence in aboriginal men. I don’t know if good old Germaine has everything right but I really thinks she makes some important points that get forgotten, particularly about the way white fellas moving into this country used aboriginal women and how that affected aboriginal men and the relationship between aboringinal men and women, and how aboriginal men have lost so much of their role. I know Germaine is not particularly popular in Australia but personally I reckon she is a a damn good thinker and writer who stimulates useful debate. Any way, after reading Germaine and hanging out 3 loads of washing I thought I’d visit my new neighbours, Greg and Steph. I still find it amazing that Steph, who I met in Darlinghurst, came up here last year and met and married Greg and now lives on our street. They were busy unpacking boxes of Steph’s stuff from the huge container she stored at our place all last year. Any way, they managed to find time to have a cuppa with me and discuss Christmas and some of the complexities and contradictions of family life. I came home and watered my vegie garden and picked onions, chillies and spinach to go in my pot of beans that I cooked to feed me for the next week. And because Keith is still in Sydney I could cook brown rice. So every night now for the next week I will have the same dinner of brown rice and beans cooked with home grown vegies and a few spices and I know most people don’t understand but I love it! Any way, on the evening of the first day of the year I was eating my rice and beans and watching “Brides of Christ” (thanks Gem for that gift that surprisingly I am really enjoying). I had the doors open to get some of the coolish breeze, and of course thousands of moths and other small flying creatures were coming inside to meet their doom pointlessly hurling themsleves against any light source in the house.  Then in came a snake! It advanced in it’s circular way forward into my living room. And where was Keith when I really needed him - in Sydney! I hadn’t seen a snake here before but I had been told they are around and many of them quiet poisonous. I can cope with spiders just fine, but snakes… Well, I managed to unfreeze myself and go to the kitchen and grabbed a broom and approached the snake and tried to shove him out the door. He sort of flew up into the air and it all happened so quickly so I didn’t know if he went outside or went under any of the furniture around the door. I had to move all the furniture and jump back to check. I couldn’t see him so thougth he must have taken the hint and went away. For the rest of the night I kept checking the floor. Today my colleagues told me I should have either got a shovel and tried to whack him to death or left him alone and called the Alice Springs snake man and just waited. Any way, both snake and I survived. Then my hayfever hit again. At the moment there is grass full of seed everywhere around here and I have to take triple doses of antihistimine tablets and nose sprays and eye drops to survive. I went to bed with nose pouring and eyes itching and just waited for the drugs to kick in and dry me up and knock me out. And that was the first day of the year. I reluctantly got up this morning and before I went to work I had my breakfast and read Leunig (thanks Mil for the present of “The Lot”) and he quotes an aboriginal man who says “each day faces you like a murderer”, which Leunig describes as “an enlivening truth to stimulate the spirit”. Well, after yesterday, this rang quite true.

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