ARIA Award

The ARIA Award goes to...

Well, perhaps I should explain what ARIA is. No, it's not the Australian Recording Industry Association. It's the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia. This was developed by the Commonwealth Dept of Health and the National Key Centre of Social Applications of Geographic Information System in 1997 (there is such a centre!... I wonder what else they do other than ARIA awards...).

The ARIA measures how far you are, from any one point, to the nearest urban centre. There are 5 major categories: major city, inner regional, outer regional, remote and very remote. There is also a category called 'migratory' but unless this relates to birds or the nearest urban centre is liable to move, I'm not really sure what that one means.

The class of remoteness is assessed according to the 'restriction upon accessibility to the widest range of goods, services and opportunities for social interaction'.

But what does this really mean in practice:

Goods

• I stock up on my favourite toothpaste and soaps whenever I'm in town
• Passing visitors bring me out emergency supplies when I miscalculate stocks
• I have all the non-fiction books I'll need for the next year piled up around me
• If my laptop dies, I'm stuffed
• I've learned to live without a highlighter. It' s just not high priority enough to remember on town trips.

Services

• My front and back screen doors don't close properly. They will continue not to close properly until we either get a training course for the young fellas on CDEP or I get new doors
• The dogs get into my bin on a regular basis (bins are emptied sporadically, all depends what the fellas are doing that day)
• My tax is overdue. I keep forgetting to do something about it, but it all seems too complicated to work out. Calling up, explaining, sending the papers, etc
• Getting something laminated requires more organisation than it's worth.
• My hair is getting long, and I'm resorting to leave-in hair conditioner.
• One day, I'm going to have to work out how to get that pinboard mounted onto my office wall. Myself.

Opportunities for social interaction

• Thankfully, I like my own company.

So, the ARIA goes to ... Kanpa!

Bush Kitchen

Consistent with my prediliction for all matters food, I thought I'd turn my hands to the bush kitchen. Food and cooking in the outback.

It is an unmistakable fact that since I've moved to Kanpa, I've made more creative meals than I have in decades.

Case in point: Tonight's Fetta and Baked Pumpkin Pizza (with Homemade Pizza Dough).

As Pip can attest, I don't really cook. And certainly not with any sense of creativity. Pizza is a good example. It generally doesn't come with a recipe (instead requiring the cook to exercise some quality of invention to personalise his or her pizza), and I certainly don't bother to create or knead dough under normal circumstances.

Perhaps it's the fact that I just can't go out for dinner. So if I want to avoid eating steamed vegies with a can of salmon (my old standby dinner) or make a one-pot stew strictly according to the recipe (and from a selection of favourites that I can count on one hand), I need to get more creative. I've got a bit more time on my hands too, with not seeing 2 movies a week, going out, or popping up to the local theatre.

So, when the moment comes in between reading, listening to podcasts or music, or doing another laborious load of washing on my twin tub washing machine, I am sometimes inspired to approach the kitchen like an enthusiastic novitiate. I've even taken to turning out meat and 3 veg dinners (which had always seemed too daunting - how on earth do you coordinate 4 items with disparate cooking requirements to come out at the same time?!).

Recent delights include Vegie Pack Soup (believe it or not but I've never used those soup packs, who on earth would have thought you could just chuck them all in at once), Lentil Soup Creation, and Spinach & Ricotta Filo Parcels. And even though I told Pip not to send anything I wouldn't know immediately what to do with, perhaps I will find a way after to use that tub of preserved lemons...

But a tub of preserved lemons is hardly the thing needed for the Yarnangu bush kitchen. Last week, my friend Tahana and I were lucky enough to be invited to a bush tucker feast unlike any I've seen (and this just a mere 200m from my door).

A knock on the door and the invitation to see 3 emus and 2 bush turkeys make their final hours in the world was extended. Bernard Newberry had been out hunting and, courtesy of the excellent rain in recent months, there was an abundance of things to shoot. Emus from Laverton had migrated up to the Lands and were hanging around waiting to have their necks broken, legs cut off below the knee, plucked, singed and then slung bum pointing up in a communal sacrificial pit.

A long pit, fit for the 3 emu bodies, was prepared. After it burnt down to coals, these were shovelled out and the birds thrown in. Bernard told me that in the 'olden days', they used to stuff the birds with eucalyptus leaves (in order to 'fatten' the birds and extend the meat further amongst all the waiting family members). The birds were also cooked in a type of oven created by hollowing out a cave in the side of pit, which cooked the birds slower. But today, they were being cooked like a marlu (kangaroo), by being placed at the bottom of the pit with coals and dirt heaped around them. The dirt helps to stop the outside of the bird from being charred. As Bernard said, 'it's not a burnt sacrifice'.

While hunting with a gun is clearly a better way to down a bird, I wondered how emus used to be hunted. Bernard told me that they hunted them by luring the emu into a smaller space, then closing off the exit. Alternatively, witchetty grubs were hung in a circle from a tree, and when the emu approached, the hunter (who was perched in the tree) would spear the bird from above. The 'food in the tree' method was also what my colleague Robin Smythe said was used to hunt bush turkey, although the hunter was nearby with a boomerang ready instead of being in the tree itself.

Bush turkeys are normally thrown onto the top of a small fire, and cooked this way. That night, however, the turkeys were on their way back to be cooked in the oven. While Bernard thinks it spoils the turkeys a little, as they have more flavour when cooked on a fire, both Maria (Bernard's partner) and I agreed that it was a less gritty way to each a turkey.

The little kids are Maria's grandchildren and the nephew of one of the other residents here.

Breakfast with James Blundell

One of the delightful things about being in a slightly bigger remote town in the middle of nowhere is that, just sometimes, things happen in Warburton that wouldn't happen elsewhere.


Like James Blundell doing a special Warburton gig.


The Tamworth Country Music Festival On Tour was visiting about 20 remote towns in country Western Australia over 8 weeks. Warburton was on the list. The line up: James Blundell and Felicity Someone (she just won a Golden Guitar).


While I'm not much of a country music fan, other than the Dixie Chicks, even I know James Blundell and Way Out West.


So, with more careful attention to detail than usual, I made sure to be in Warburton last Monday night for a private concert with James Blundell.


The main Yarnangu cohort I hang out with at any community events are the West family women. They urged me to find out if James would do requests. I hardly needed prompting. After all, when else would I get the chance to speak to James and with a valid pretext.


Once I'd tracked him down in the little battered caravan next to the stage, he amiably agreed to dedicate 'Way out West' to the West family. We settled down in a pile of blankets, surrounded by the cool April fog and a clear night sky, to listen to the show.


The show as on a temporary stage down by the oval. Family groups sat around in small circles, dotted around the oval. Utes, landcruisers, troopies, and battered cars surrounded the smaller circles, just outside the low white fence of the oval. A game of touch footy was being played by the kids up the back.


The local coppers wandered around, smiling. Probably hoping that Yarnangu weren't too pissed off about being booked for traffic offences by all the visiting coppers on a marijuana sting operation the week before. The visiting coppers swaggered about, forgetting that they're the minority and not that ninti for anything really.


And Felicity and James played on. In between songs, there was a smattering of applause, but mostly just a quiet audience, watching the show, enjoying the music. A few nurses got up to dance, but only young kids joined them. Intermittently, one in a bunch of adolescent girls would jump out of the security of their group, and gyrate their hips to the music, arms in the air (this particularly erotic form of dance is the only one I've seen out here, apparently copied from black American music video clips).


After Way out West, with the cold setting in, and only one more song to go, we packed up and started to retreat to the comfort of our respective beds. Just at the final set ended, Debra and Nyingurta decided to ask for their photos to be taken with James. Like true groupies, we clustered around the caravan door, and finally emerging, we converged upon him. Like a true star, he was friendly and willing to pose for any number of photos. But was he just being nice, in a practiced star-like manner? Regardless, much was made later when we poured over the shots of Nyingurta being 'held tight' by Mr Blundell. See the squeeze at the top of her right shoulder!:



But what of breakfast?


The next morning, while poking around the roadhouse camp kitchen, I suddenly realised that my other breakfasting companion was none other than James himself. As often happens in the kitchen with passing visitors, we struck up a conversation and had a nice little exchange about what we were both doing here and what it meant for each us respectively.


And yes, he really is a nice bloke! I'm won over. He looks good in jeans, and perhaps it's time that the Dixie Chicks had some competition.