Night Sight
Belinda posted this evocative image on her FB page, check it out. From https://www.facebook.com/belindabroughtonpoet/phot...
I remember this night. This time of the year, 2015. We were camping out at Mulga Bore. The feral donkeys were particularly raucous that night, braying and galloping around at 3 in the morning, waking us with a start, anxious not to be in the path of a stampede.
Hardwired for Story
Men having kupati in Fregon
It usually happens in the sandhill country north of Pimba on the Stuart highway. I don't know if it happens for everyone, I guess not, but for me it is as palpable as it is subtle, and as perceptible as it is predictable. I call it a brain reboot.
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Wati showing the underground stream
We were sitting in the departure lounge of Adelaide airport on route to Cairns, the Manta Nganampa Dancers and me, their cameraman. From there we'd continue by mini-bus to Mossman and on to the Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival, singing all the way, Ngintaka (perentie), Caterpillar, Wanampi (Rainbow Serpent), Hallelujah. I turned to the tjilpi (old man) across from me and asked him over my cappuccino and his kupa-tea, "How is it, since Anangu have their Tjukurpa, still alive, right back from the beginning, their songs, their stories, their country, how is it that Anangu are so interested in Christianity?"
He often took inspiration from the Old Testament to get ...
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Sunrise Out Side Port Augusta On Route To Pimba
Map Link for Pimba
The old man sat on the ground as if he were rising up out of it, his cowboy hat and mile wide smile making him more caricature than real to my untrained eye, exaggerating his features and amplifying his presence.
The main meeting over and the circle dispersed, he nudged over to me and said he had been a camera man too, with PY Media. He recorded many, many Inma and celebrations over the years. But that was a long time ago.
I struggled with the rising and falling cadenzas of ...
Read moreThe Cow Shed
That's my dad, Arnold Salomon on the right with his poddy calf at the calf show in 1938. He didn't win. Notice the footwear (or lack of). From this we can safely assume he is still at school and dairy farming and raising poddy calves is a part time pursuit.
The milking shed photo from the previous post turned up when we were going through Dad's things. Looking now, I realise I hadn't really looked at it before. The people had caught my attention, my granddad in the right milking stall, and my dad, or so he told my sister, is in the left. It was his eyesight that grew dim in later years, not his memory. Grandad's about the age of my children now, perhaps a bit younger and Great Granny Goos with camera in hand, was then about my age now. I remember the Box Brownie she passed on to Grandma. We only see her shadow, her back to the morning sun.
Condamine Dawning
The photo was taken of morning milking on a typical morning at Proston in 1938 by Great Granny Goos. By the look of her shadow, she's most likely using a Kodak Box Brownie like the one I first took photos with. It was a useful camera with two viewfinders.
Memories of old women with thin boney hands and skin incapable of thermal retention. In my farming community, men's hands and women's hands were oh so different, men's, growing thick and calloused, like a pair of bricks as their lady's hands grew thin and wispy.
Life on the land wasn't for me. Mum said ...
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