Turtle Touring

One of the great frustrations with my job is the lack of housing. I've made comments before on the blog, but it's worth another indulgence if you'll please.

Theoretically, my job is to work up agreements between community members and government, and to help them advocate for and present those agreements at government meetings. That's the theory anyhow.

In order to do that job, you need to actually meet and get to know community members. Without this, you have no job.

If you tried to do that task from Alice Springs, you'd never get back to your computer. It takes nearly a day to reach the first community, let alone talk to anyone.

When you try to do it from the Lands, you still find that some weeks clock up to 3000k on your odometer! The region is, after all, the size of Victoria.

So, after deciding to up stakes and just take a risk, I moved out and trusted to fate.

The end result was living in 4 different houses in one year, with 3 different office spaces.

And, even then, I still felt like a turtle! By that, I mean, I would have to carry around my house on my back, wandering from place to place. My yurltu would be packed with sleeping bag, pillow, swag, food in the fridge, clothes for anything from 2 days to 2 weeks, and myriad safety gear.*

Plans are quick to change out here, and it's not always possible to make the 400k round trip home to pick up your sneakers.

* I use the past tense because the job has changed so markedly there is no longer much point in being on the road constantly, developing agreements with community members. When government can be responsive to the agreement-making process, perhaps the turtle will reappear!