From Efwa:Efwa, 'I loved the drama and poetry of this' It's a fantastic story isn't it? But remember it's Mollys story. I haven't seen the film, but I have seen where it was made in the outback. There's this little shanty town, the name escapes me for the moment, I'll dig it out of my notes when I get a chance, which is basically a bunkhouse next to a railway line. Population is four. There's a mad Englishman called Harry who wanders the outback every day searching for a ...

Dear all, In 1931 a young woman, Molly, 14,  and her sisters, were forcibly removed from their families in East Pulbara, West Australia and transported to Moore river, North of Perth. This was a period in Australian history when children were forcibly removed from their parents 'for their own good'. They were of the people Mardudjura. Molly was the daughter borne or Maude, a Mardu woman, in 1917 and grew up around Jigalong, North East of Perth. She spoke Martuwangka...

Dear all, Heading North from Port Augusta, the outback stretches endlessly before you. It is hot, dusty, dry and drippingly empty. The Stuart Highway winds slowly west and then north, skirting the magnificent Flinders ranges. It passes between vast, inland salt lakes, remnants of an ancient inland sea that evaporated millions of years ago leaving a rheumy white crust as the only memory of water. A warning sign on the shores of these desolate lakes, covered like ice, tells yo...

Dear all, From time to time, like Odysseus, a wanderer will come across something so astounding that they are rendered speechless. I want you to come back with me to 1970, when something truly awful occured. The place is Yungay, in the Peruvian Andes, about forty miles north of Huaras. Huaras is one of those frontier towns, a place where a gumbo of souls gather for their own reasons; to escape, to widen their horizons, to challenge themselves. Huaras for example, is one ...

Although the disapperaence of the human into the beyond had seemed to lessen the harshness of the weather cycles, the seasons were still brutish, extreme and unforgiving. I had kept my knives sharp, my arrows keen. At first I loathed the hunt, buit slowly came to understand, to accept it, it's necessity and it's purpose. I had read that at the end of a hunt, the beast gazes calmly, acceptingly, waits for the stroke that ends their life. It is true. I remembered Shelagh. @@@@@@@@@@@...

Dear all, The songlines are a fascinating concept. Among other things they are also a map of Australia from the aboriginal perspective. In theory an aborigine can sing himself right across the land, from one end to another. The song is like a mental map, a list of routes from one water hole to another, one piece of hunting ground to another. When an aborigine is born, he inherits part of the dreaming, and this is his responsibility for life, to maintain the land that he inherits ...

Dear all, As part of my current odyssey, my walkabout has taken me deep into the aboriginal territory of thinking. The aborigines are not one people but are many, and there are as many as two hundred different languages. They are an ancient people, having lived in Australia, some would say, for up to fifty thousand years, populating the land in a series of crashing waves. They have a beautiful creation story called the dreamtime. The following is from Bruce Chatwins Songlines*, a ...

Dear all, Finally back in Sydney again. I flew in tired but happy having spent a marvellous New Year back in Tasmania. God but I love that place. I took a taxi and was chatting to the driver and said this to him. He told me that he'd come here fifteen years earlier for two weeks construction work. He said he knew within five minutes that he would stay here for the rest of his life. And he had. I was relieved to find that my suitcase was still alive, I wasn't overly confident t...

Well I had a bloody rotten Christmas, full of flu and cold in a damp Melbourne hotel. I even wrote a song about it (Cud, we're putting the band back together for the fourth time): Something I penned while full of cold and squeezing my breath out through my lungs. 'On a damp Melbourne eve still unable to dream, where even the songs have grown quiet, going through hell in my stop-gap hotel, it's the silence that makes me run riot. Thinking of you as I chew on cold stew, that I save wh...

This, like all history, is fabricated All history is a fabrication of some kind. Records of the past are incomplete, written records carry their author's bias, historians their own prejudices, no matter how well controlled. A fabrication is the result. The title of Keith Windschuttle's book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is some crazy tautology. Maybe this is why the discussion about it continues to go round and round in circles. Windschuttle argues in the final chapter of his bo...

Keith Windschuttle: No slander in exposing cultural brutality December 29, 2003 In December last year a group of demonstrators stood in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, outside the book launch of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History holding up signs denouncing the author as racist. They were employees of the SBS indigenous affairs unit and readily admitted none had read my book. Instead, their protest was sparked by an article on this page where I said the Tasmanian Aborigines had died out no...

Ferabo, 'You have something that John, I, and so many others have lost--your youth!! ' Oi! Speak for yourself! I'm still young! Well except for the nostril and ear hairs - I mean what's the bloody survival advantage of that? Why after the age of 30 does your nostril hair decide that it wants to see the world and start sprouting from the cavities? And why do the words lumbago and arthritis and prostrate suddenly take on a very real meaning? Why is it that suddenly one begins to bel...

Skitty, You know I've been packing boxes getting ready to return to the land of my fathers, the land of song, Wales. While doing this I stumbled accross an old, occasional diary I kept from when I was about your age. It's fascinating, almost like a time capsule, as though I'm talking to myself across the weight and wealth of years that have since passed. When I was your age, the cold war was a very real worry. The arms race was escalating, social order was falling apart, the dead lai...

Ishmael waved Hu forward and gestured to the seat that had been made ready for him. Hu smiled and bowed briefly, almost imperceptibly. He declined the seat and instead sat neatly, in one fluid movement on the floor gesturing for Ishmael to join him on the rosewood veneer. 'The earth would be younger but for this floor.' Hu observed smiling. 'I fear I'm too old to learn to be as flexible as your goodself master Hu.' Ishmael smiled. Hu seemed to consider this for a second or two an...

Luthor shifted and turned towards me, regarding my absent blinking eyes. Finally I decided to shut them, the sun was too bright to keep them open and besides I could hear him. The thought briefly flickered that I resented Luthor intruding on my perfect isolation, but in truth I quietly welcomed his presence. As if he were sensing my thoughts, I heard Luthor as he sucked in the breeze between his teeth. 'Do you miss us John?' I smiled eyes shut. 'Of course fool, how could I not? Do...