Hi all

So we left Ceduna late, thanks to the stupid clocks going forward and headed into town to an Aboriginal Culture and Arts Centre. We spent a good hour and a half chatting to the (white) woman who runs the place and trying our hardest to like some of the work that the Aborigines had produced for sale here. We failed. But only just. We eventually decided against buying one piece in particular because we don’t like coons. Only joking. We just didn’t quite like it enough to shell out $300. Some of the work was really beautiful, but just not quite right for us. Better, we decided, to get something that really took our breath away than something that we couldn’t quite agree on. Aboriginal art is for life, not just for your holiday.

The art itself always tells a story. It is made up of thousands of coloured dots and squiggles and shapes, and each squiggle and shape has a different meaning and is part of the over all story. Some of the stuff we’ve seen is absolutely wonderful. Although we didn’t buy anything, we did spend a good deal of time chatting to the lady who worked as the ‘co-ordinator’ there. And most interesting it turned out to be.

The place is run using Federal grants and charity money to provide the materials. The indigenous people (I’m nothing if not PC) can go in and produce paintings which then go on sale in the shop. This counts as part of the Work For The Dole initiative they have in place over here. Sweet. Except it’s fraught with difficulties. The guys that come in think that they only have to come in two days a week, and that they can have four hour lunch breaks. They don’t seem to understand that the more they produce, the more they are likely to sell. And they don’t seem to understand that their ‘top-up’ to their dole money is the 60% they receive whenever they sell a work. The other 40% goes to the Centre. The prices incidentally range from $150 to $1200. Also, as they are a nomadic people, the lady spends weeks, sometimes months, training them in different techniques only for them to up sticks and go Walkabout. So the centre never gets the benefit. But other centres do. Hmmmm. She was quite forthright about wanting to teach them pottery and to use different materials and textures in their work and the frustration she feels when they either refuse, or learn them then move on. I stopped short of asking her if she thought that this teaching of new techniques wasn’t going to corrupt thousands of years of traditional art. It just didn’t seem right. She also referred to them as ‘urbanised Aborigines’, like it was something to be proud of. Un-urbanised aborigines were referred to as ‘traditional’ - ‘You know, the ones you see out in the street drunk and shouting, violent and abusive’. It sounded a bit to me like when you tame a wild animal. I didn’t like it. I actually prefer the term used by a lot of people. Feral. Its just so much more honest of the way these people are viewed. It just seems that too often our idea of helping a disenfranchised and disaffected people is to force our beliefs and systems on them whether they want it or not. And it was us who disenfranchised them in the first place. I don’t really know enough about it right now, so I won’t go off on one just yet. But watch this space...

Leaving the Cultural Centre, we headed straight out for a place just down the coast called Smoky Bay. Which is right next to Streaky Bay. We were truly gutted when we found out that these places weren’t named after bacon, although how they justify the existence of Danish Rindless Middle Back Bay just down the road I have no idea. Anyhoo, with Mand falling asleep at the wheel after about ten minutes, it was left to me to drive for the rest of the day. Streaky Bay is renowned for it’s remarkably cheap and remarkably fresh oysters. Neither of us are particularly fond of oysters, at best they’re like chewy seawater and at worst like a mouthful of someone else’s lumpy green snot. But the copper and his wife had grilled some for Mand back in Esperance with bacon and Worcestershire Sauce and she was still raving about it. Cool. We got to Smoky Bay before we realised that 99.9% of the campsites we stay on don’t have a grill. D’oh! So we took a quick picture, just for the sake of it, and headed on to Smoky Bay. Which is also renowned for it’s oysters. b******s.

But just down from there we had heard about a place called Point Labatt and it’s colony of sealions. We just couldn’t resist. We drove for miles and miles along dirt roads marked ‘The Scenic Drive’. If this was the scenic bit, then God help the normal boring dreary drive. Let’s just say farmer’s fields. Thousands and thousands of acres of them. Eventually though, we came to the turn off and headed out to the point. Over another 20 odd km of busted up dirt road, which had Priscilla bouncing like Jordan’s jubblies. Along the way, Mand suddenly screamed ‘Stop’ at the top of her voice and made me jump so much that we nearly ended up in a ditch. Out in the water about two miles from where we were, she’d spotted some sealions. My enquiry as to whether she was sure they weren’t surfers was met with a tired smile. We stood and watched them with the binoculars for a while and then headed on down to Point Labatt proper. Where we were duly ‘rewarded’ with fifty or so sealions sunbathing on the rocks 200 feet below us. Do you know the difference between sealions and seals? I do. No, I’m not telling you. Look it up. Ok, it’s because of their tails. Sealions have a tail that ends in two flippers so they can ‘walk’ on land. Seals just have a tail and have to wiggle. Erm, that’s about it. Glad you asked now aren’t you? So we stood and watched as the sealions laid on the beach. Occasionally one would strike a pose, sitting up and holding one flipper in the air. This is so they can cool down, nature lovers. But for the most part they just laid there. Was it worth the hour of bumping up and down over a dirt track, and the hour of the same back to the road just to watch a few bags of blubber laying in the sand? Yes it truly was. They were beautiful. Gorgeous. I want one. I want that one. And this is the only natural colony in the whole of Australia and as such are a protected species. Sweet. The rest got clubbed and shot by our nature loving colonial cousins...

By the time we got back on the ‘main’ road we realised just how late in the day it was getting but decided to push on to Port Augusta anyway. We were really hoping to get the car in for it’s 5000km warranty service on the following day (Friday), have a weekend watching the Ashes and then head for Alice Springs on Monday. So on we went.

The next thing we wanted to see was a place called Murphy’s Haystacks, and as it was on the way we figured we could stop off and have a quick look. En route we came across something slightly strange. Once again in the middle of absolutely nowhere (we’d been driving for about three quarters of an hour and not seen a structure of any sort, nor even another car) we came across a church. A brand spanking new church. Across the road from it was (presumably) a farmhouse. Which looked like something from a horror movie. All corrugated iron on the windows and a junked fifty year old truck with weeds growing round it. I got out to get a picture of the church, which had dust blowing round it just to add to the ambience. I started to feel slightly uneasy. Every horror film I’ve ever seen involving hillbillies and brutal murder came back to me and I started to feel like I was being watched. I turned and looked back at the house. Nothing was moving. I took a picture of the house and, to prove I wasn’t really that scared, lingered a little to take a picture of the wind thingy these farms have. You know the squeaky one that goes really fast when something bad is about to happen. Then with forced nonchalance I walked back to the car half expecting to be grabbed by the shoulder at any moment and had a really scary moment where I caught sight of myself in the wing mirror and s*** myself. I hate it when that happens...

Murphy’s Haystacks turned out to be some huge red coloured boulders sitting in as flat a landscape as you’re likely to come across. No Ularu or Stonehenge mind, but pretty impressive nonetheless. We truly had no idea what they were going to be, so it was quite a nice surprise. We even paid the ‘Conscience Box’ on the way in. Only half though obviously...

We got to the town of Wudinna and stopped for petrol and a piss. I decided we’d better phone the campsite and book a cabin (no car to sleep in and the tent is truly a no go area from now on) and tell them that we’d be in late. Predictably, we had no signal. Now Wudinna is a petrol station and a toilet. That’s it. The one phone box they also have, was jammed. In the middle of nowhere, some d*** wad had vandalised the firkin phone box. Back to the petrol station. ‘Is there another phone box anywhere?’ ‘Nah love, that’s it.’ ‘The coin slot is jammed.’ ‘Do you want a screwdriver?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘A screwdriver to beat them out.’ ‘Erm, no.’ By now I could see this was yet another version of the unhelpful shop assistant we keep encountering. Now I like to think that if I lived in the middle of f*** all and someone wanted to use the payphone and it was broken, that I’d offer to let them use mine. In fact I know I would. This woman offered to sell me a $30 phonecard because ‘that’d probably still work’. At this point Mand came in and announced that there was a freephone number I could call. With a last look at the glassy eyed shop ‘assistant’ I left and spoke to a wonderful woman at the campsite. Sweet.

We got about halfway to Port Augusta before it got truly dark. Like it only can in the bush (ooohhh seasoned traveller speak) and it was with some trepidation that we carried on. They don’t do streetlights out here and all you get is the cat’s eyes and reflective posts at 50 yard intervals to let you know where you should be going. Like driving over the back of Portsdown Hill only this goes on for miles and miles. And on the back of Portsdown Hill, the biggest thing you’re likely to hit is a rabbit. Over here, the local rabbits are 5 feet tall, are about 400 pounds of rippling muscle and are known as kangaroos. Which was a bit of a worry. Especially when Mand screamed like we were going to die a couple of times along the way. The first when she saw a roo. It was about the size of a cat and was sat off to the side of the road. The second time was when we came across a streetlight. It was as random as it gets. Just one streetlight in miles of darkness. Echoes of Narnia abound. For some reason, Mand thought it was a motorbike coming right for us. How I laughed as I swerved violently away from where she was pointing and nearly put us in a ditch for the second time that day...

The only other thing to break up the journey was a giant Galah. This was so unexpected that I had to screech to a stop in the middle of the road and reverse up a 100 yards. It was another of these uniquely Australian huge model animals. All it is is a 20 foot fibreglass Galah. Why? I have no idea, but apparently there are loads of these things all over the place, the most famous of which is a giant lobster somewhere on the East coast. It’s a bit sad, but I can’t wait to see more of them. Mand got a little freaked out when the cockatoo in the cage by the front of the shop kept saying ‘hello’ and had already answered it half a dozen times before I could stop laughing enough to tell her what it was. Bless her.

Eventually though, knackered and fraught from our journey we arrived at our campsite. To be met with the words ‘You’re lucky. We were just about to close.’ Not bad thanks, how are you? The moody b**** behind the counter admonished me for being half an hour later than I said I’d be, f***ed up the booking and had to start again twice, looking at me like it was my fault while she did it, then eventually gave me a key and some rough instructions on how to get to our cabin and ushered me out the door. Like she had something really important to do at 10pm on a Thursday night in Port Augusta. Probably off to join her two friends and find a way to make a Scottish laird into a king.

The cabin was sweet as it gets, queensize double bed, cable telly, self-contained kitchen, en suite bathroom and air con. Now that’s what I’m talking about. After dinner (toast) and a minor panic/tantrum when I couldn’t work out how to turn the telly on (there’s a switch by the bed) we finally crashed out.

The next four days were spent just lazing around in the cabin, watching England get smashed at the cricket (Harmison? Hoggarth? Strauss? Why bother?), watching Pompey get smashed by the Geordies and getting smashed ourselves (we finally finished the wine from Margaret River and even the Tawny Port we were saving for Christmas). Nice.

But one thing did happen to make the stay absolutely memorable. The Heatons are pregnant. Well, Kate is. Stuy just looks like he is. I know I’ve said it a million times already but congratulations again. Love you both millions and soon to be baby Heaton (I’m convinced it’s a girl by the way) won’t run short of babysitter all the time Mand is about. Personally I’ll be in the pub :o) I’m truly made up for the pair of you, even though it means we won’t be enjoying your company for a little while longer. But I promise we’ll be back just as soon as baby is past the puking, s***ting, crying all the time stage, and we can spoil him/her rotten and get them all hectic right before bed time. Cool. Love the three of you more than Stu loves his little generals xxx

On the way out of Port Augusta we headed for the cultural centre which was a pile of dog poo. I don’t know why, but I’m finding it really difficult to take any sort of interest in Aboriginal culture or the history of Australia. I really have no idea why. This museum was excellent in itself. Interactive, beautifully laid out with displays on indigenous culture, the outback, the first explorers and of course the mining. I just find it all a bit, well, crap. Hopefully this will change though, because after we’d bimbled around the centre for a while, we got back on the road and headed off to Coober Pedy. The opal mining capital of the world (apparently) and the place where Mad Max, Pitch Black and Stark (among others) were shot. Cool.

Laters all

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