PART I: Road tripping to ancient rememberings.
Something primal gets ignited in me when I’m in these lands. My instincts for the things my ancestors once knew so intimately for their survival, for their connection, come alive in me.
As soon as I land on the red pindan, the only things I start to care about are sensing the subtle changes in the wind direction, the smell of rising humidity that will shape the coming days, how the Gubinge leaves are holding on late this year and the baby Mangoes are early and what this means about both rain and heat, which way the early morning lizard, hermit crab, wallaby and snake tracks are walking, and tuning into the moon cycles and the subsequent 10m tides that it pushes and pulls in this region.
Right now, I’m in the Kimberley, in North West of Australia.
On some of the most ancient lands that have ever existed on our planet.
Rocks many billions of years old.
Life forms many hundreds of millions of years old.
Culture, unbroken for many tens of thousands of years.
It is consider one of the last 4% of the world that is “untouched”.
My body knows it is somewhere raw.
I transform.
We travel up here every year and have done for nearly a decade now to run surf programs with local schools and Indigenous communities.
In the eyes of the ocean, everyone is equal. Salt water therapy transforms lives.
And this is salt water country.
These lands are familiar to me, growing up in the Northern Territory. There is a united “northerner” front that is real. I just have drop a quick gammon in sentence, and there’s a secret nod shared.
In a kind of Game of Thrones way, except less about being united around deathly cold of the North and more about the deathly heat, and the other environmental and cultural challenges unique to the Top End.
But there is something different about this coast that I never got to experience in the NT as a kid.
You can swim in it, for one.
For the most part, there are no crocs or lethal jellyfish (despite big signs everywhere that there are), the water is crystal blue, and is a delicious heavenly retreat from the tropical desert heat of the neighbouring hot and dry Pilbara. It is a true oasis in truly ancient lands.
*Edit: A day after publishing this, the beach was closed because of a croc.
This year, we drove up. We drove 2500+km in two days.
Averaging 12-13 hours driving a day.
We started at 4am every day, so we could get a solid 5 hours stint in before breakfast and our bodies (and the children) realised we were chained to our seats for another 7-8 hours.
Ripe and full Brother Moon guided us for the first few hours in the dark, until he set in the west, and Mother Sun rose for a long day, in the East, and we bid her farewell and sweet dreams in the West again, when Brother Moon awoke in the East himself once more. And so it went.
Australian Indigenous cultures are one of the only Indigenous cultures (that I know of) to recognise the Sun as the mother / woman archetype, instead of Father / masculine. The moon is also perceived simply as a sibling of the Mother.
Perhaps, because it is a 60,000 year old culture. Compared to “simply just” a 5,000 year old culture.
Perspective.
It remembers a different truth.
I wonder if perhaps women didn’t need to have rituals honouring their bleed on the Moon, and the Mother Moon archetype, because they were already all powerful. They were the Sun. All life.
Perhaps the moon was reserved for ceremonies of fishing and hunting, for the men.
When I’m on Country later this week (or quenching my thirst at Magabala Books - a local Indigenous owned and run Publishing House), I’ll try and seek a deeper understanding to this.
Flying up here would have been easier.
Probably much cheaper too, considering the current price of Diesel!
What I like about driving, instead of flying though, is that I get to witness the transition of the lands I’m transversing. And we get to do it all together as a family.
It becomes a pilgrimage.
There is nothing like a sunset or sunrise from a plane window.
You feel you are dancing in the realm of the cosmos. Above it all.
But it’s different watching a sunrise or sunset from the grounded and tiny perspective of road tripping across empty and expansive desert. I still feel part of the expansiveness of the entire Universe, but in a more small and humble way. Part of it all.
We left the tall trees behind us about one fifth of the way into our journey, somewhere in the Wheatbelt. The trees slowly morphed into tall-ish shrubs. Which morphed into small bushes. Until there was just spindly grass amongst rocky ironstone red dust.
Occasionally the white gums would gather in circle, on the horizon, in what would no doubt become a small pool or river in the Wet.
We would find water there, if we really needed it.
These are the things you don’t get to know deeply about Land when you hop on a plane and travel 3 hours, instead of 3 days.
The delicate story of between here and there.
The story of Country.
Also, the story of how things “actually work” in the lands beyond my own privileged little bubble.
The stuff I don’t necessarily want to see.
One of the reasons I love Western Australia is we are fairly self-sufficient here. We make all our own power, gas, concrete, steel, building materials, farming (from mangoes, bananas, to wheat, cattle and potatoes), etc.
I mean, we obviously ship 90% of it off to China and then buy it back again at a premium.
But I’ll talk about that part later.
Essentially, though, we have everything we need for a “civilised” society, without imports.
It’s one of the reasons why I love my home in the South West so much, too. I can source almost everything I need within a 50km radius of my home. I’m not talking about the fact there’s even a Kmart nearby (which I think is actually more than 50km away). I’m talking about real food, water, energy and shelter.
Just over a year ago, I decided to try and only buy, trade, grow or barter food from within a local 50km radius (with only few exceptions there were still from within the state).
This meant no supermarkets, no imported or unseasonal foods, and definitely no rice, no lentils, no coconut products, etc. Because these are mostly not things produced locally in WA, and certainly not within 50km of the fairly dry mediterranean climate I live in.
It took a bit of readjusting my diet to suit that one of my local environment, which took me re-learning what I had come to understand from a fairly white colonialist perspective of “diet”.
Sidenote: feeling the urge to insert one of my all time inspirational social media accounts / movements here on the “whiteness” of our food systems (and a whole lot more): @agrowingculture / A Growing Culture.
Even the South West’s own “regeneratively farmed Oat Milk” is sent off to Italy for processing before it hits the shelves back where it started, in the South West.
But this isn’t just a conversation about food miles, climate change, and all that jazz.
It’s as simple as - it’s just natural to eat locally.
It is not natural to have access to absolutely everything that exists in the World at the click of your fingers. This is a byproduct of synthetic living.
Externalities.
Someone or something or somewhere else, externally, bears the cost.
And I am reminded of this as we travel the lands of rural and remote Western Australia.
I am reminded of the externalised cost of my privilege.
I am reminded at the petrol station of Mount Magnet, a small industrial Wheatbelt town, where nearly every still-inhabited house is boarded up with makeshift security screens. Not in the way houses here in the Top End are for cyclones. But in the way the social and economic inequality I’m part of, underpin a cycle of despair, theft and violence in far away places.
I am reminded as I travel the Great Northern Highway through Meekatharra and Newman, of this whole other world and life of “Truckies”. The Truckies that feed the privilege of our overly-convenient supermarkets that allow us to access asparagus all year round, the privilege of petrol in our tanks when want to go 4WDing to the beach for a surf adventure, the privilege of the steel and aluminium that form the frames of the caravan we’re travelling in.
I am reminded when I watch the many-kilometre long trains, where you can’t even see them start or finish, filled with our golden earth, head to the world’s largest industrial Port in Port Hedland, to fill up the most enormous tankers I’ve ever seen, and ship off our natural resources at an unfathomable rate and quantity. We saw three tankers leave in one hour. But these operations run 24/7. And one family profits $50million+ an hour from it.
I am reminded of the destruction to land and culture through fracking, drilling and offshore gas extraction, and how I prefer cooking on gas and like flying in aeroplanes to new places.
I am reminded of all the things I don’t see in my daily life, but are the backbone of my daily life and luxuries.
I used to be very active in “fighting” the injustices and inequalities I felt existed in the World.
I’m going to share more about that in Part II of this story.
My connection to the Kimberley is tightly woven to that time in my life.
This time though, travelling and witnessing, I felt gratitude.
Gratitude for the reminder. Gratitude for the awareness. Gratitude for all the pieces of the puzzle of this complex time of our humanity. Gratitude that I could see them, beyond my own emotional stories, world beliefs, and judgements.
But on the simplest level, instead of being angry at “the system” and those participating in it (like somehow I wasn’t part of it myself, when I was younger) I just acknowledged it for what it is.
Do I feel that our collective current trajectory is the highest aligned for humanity and the planet?
That’s not a simple yes or no answer.
Even my four year old told me, from a place of such purity and innocence, as she saw the trains full of Ore go by, “Mummy, the miners are stealing the Earth”.
Oh, darling.
The Earth is her future.
Kids always see life through the eyes of goodness, beauty and truth.
Even still, whilst what she was saying was inherently true, I also tried to explain to her that it wasn’t as simple as that.
Because it’s not.
And that’s why I was so grateful to be reminded of and reconnected to the complexity of systems that I exist in, that are so far removed from, but so intimately woven into my little bubble of life.
The Whole.
Is mining to utilise natural resources inherently wrong?
Is cutting down trees to build with and use their wood inherently wrong?
Is farming cattle inherently wrong?
Is transporting a good long distances inherently wrong?
Is destroying country to dig up lithium reserves for solar inherently wrong?
I think different people will have different answers to these questions, depending on their own emotional stories, world beliefs and judgements.
But beyond those beliefs, I would say, it’s not as simple as that.
I would also say, there is no Universal right or wrong.
All things can be used to serve and better humanity and the Earth.
But in who’s eyes are you serving and bettering? And at what cost?
I am sure when the technologies to mine Iron Ore were discovered and invented, it felt like a miracle for many. And look what it has brought us? This very laptop I’m writing on wouldn’t exist without it.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing I have a laptop?
How can this be measured by such polarity?
As we drove past towns, where houses were built from various assortments of reclaimed cladded tin, rather than a fresh and even insta-worthy exterior of newly purchased Zincalume, and people lived with so much less, I was reminded that it is indeed very possible (and perhaps quite necessary) for us to remember that we can “make do”, without the scale, speed and convenience of our current path.
Without the archetype of Bunnings convenience.
Without the industrial scale of externalities that Bunnings stands on the shoulders of.
And that the time of “more”, as decadent is it has been, may no longer be serving us.
Because when I look around, I can’t help but feel this seeking of “more” wasn’t built from a place of true abundance, but rather built upon lack and scarcity, and the ripple effect of that grows in magnitude.
Man did not weave the web of life. Remember that one, from a few posts ago?
We have been living in a time ultimately built on seeking for the Self, rather than contributing and overflowing to the Whole from inwardly full cups.
We already have everything we need. Including the knowledge and wisdom we need. Perhaps instead of extracting more, always focusing on the “next and new”, we could just use, reclaim, reuse, and reinvent what we already have. What we already know.
Including the business models that drive polarised and linear growth, consumption, time and life.
So I was grateful for that reminder as well.
How the micro and the macro are simply expressions of each other.
And that all that I have witnessed is part of me.
Connected to me.
Part of my moment here on this planet.
As much as I might want deny it, I cannot ignore that I am not separate from it.
And with that, comes responsibility.
Another reminder, that my individual choices are not very individual at all.
The journey was also different this time in another way - as we were (almost completely) unplugged digitally.
No wikicamps app, no GoogleMaps checking how many hours until the next stop, no searching for 1 bar of service in between mine sites and towns, no getting my laptop out to catch up on tasks.
(Although Raf had downloaded some music onto an old offline iPhone for when he needed a pick-me-up on the sleepy warm afternoon stretches).
Otherwise, not much, but just sitting in the car.
The Art of Slowness.
Remembering how folks used to do it as little as half a generation ago, but which feels as foreign as many lifetimes ago. Before disconnection through hyper-connection was pervasive.
We mapped our journey before we left. We’d travelled it many times before anyway. We had an old school map and an old school “Dumb Phone” as back-up if we needed.
All we really had to think about on the road was when and where we were going stop to poo.
It all felt quite primal.
We still haven’t done screens with the kids, so I packed two probably overdone boxes of wool, felt, yarn and twine and all sorts, ready to have on hand to entertain them, and that they could combine with elements of the natural environment as we travelled. But they barely touched it. A few reading books (actually, it was mostly just 3x Frozen books if I’m honest), a few beeswax crayons and a drawing book were enough.
I had also downloaded 2 episodes of ABC Kids Radio “Road Trip” sessions onto an iPod, which they were allowed to listen to, sharing one headphone each, for half an hour a day. I’ve never heard them so quiet. Raf and I kept giving each other sideways glances. Is this for real?
It was easeful enough.
We made our own simple entertainment stretch the hours, trying to establish the “waving” rules of the road.
Etiquette for one-finger-lifted-off-the-steering-wheel-wave to an oncoming vehicle as follows.
Lift finger if / when:
Visibility conditions are clear (not too dusty / reflective)
There is a single line (no island or other separation) between the lanes
You aren’t in close proximity to another vehicle
There are no other signs of civilisation (even power poles can throw you off)
The time of day is appropriate (early mornings are more cheerful)
The steering wheel position of the oncoming vehicle is at an adequate height
Prados do not wave to Landcruisers
And under no circumstances give a “fake out”, which includes forward momentum of the hand towards the steering wheel when an oncoming vehicle is approaching, or you will leave the other hanging.
It’s an art and a science, predicting who is going to finger-lift-wave / return a finger-lift-wave.
It got funnier because it got so much less funny after 10 hours, if you know what I mean.
We also played Moo-Cow-I-Win.
The first person to see a cow for the day and shout Moo-Cow-I-Win, wins.
Then you have to wait until the next day for a chance to win again.
The stakes were really high.
I think what I noticed the most though, is that I just written a fairly lengthy post just before we left about Home. I’d written it and hit send the night before we left. I felt I needed to write it before I left, because my roots were still in the ground. I hadn’t ripped them up yet.
But the trip was testing me, to see if what I’d written was true.
Yes, of course it was true.
But was it my only truth?
Naturally, as I explained in the post, that I have this interesting trait where I get obsessively committed to wherever I am / whatever I’m doing, to the point I start visualising my whole life and future around it. I often then go to an extreme length to “try it on” for real, and then realise that I’ve gotten swept up and made “a mistake”. Of course, it’s not a mistake. I am 1/3 profile in Human Design. This is my Design, to a tee. The Investigating Martyr. I am also a Projector. It’s my Design to learn the Conditioning of The Other (I’m here to guide) through by experiencing it for myself.
I know this about myself. My husband knows this about me.
Hence, why he just sort of smirks, smiles and nods whenever I get in one of those moods.
It’s essentially a perpetual fantasy world of imagination. Brain researchers would make it sound a bit more boring: prolific mental mapping and empathy muscle building.
I was in plenty of those moods throughout the trip. Let’s be honest, I’m in one of them right now, landing in the Kimberley.
Chilling out in Mount Magnet (the a little-worse-for-wear Wheatbelt town I mentioned above) and making friends with the local Indigenous kids, was no exception.
Bless little Tre-Shaun and his 1000th explanation of how a Daddy Long Legs spider can beat a Redback spider with the venom from a spike on their back (inserts hip thrusting movement), before he proceeds to tell me again, with even more excitement and hip thrusting.
There is so much potential here, Raf. I’d say. Maybe we should move here.
Not in like a White Missionary kind of way, like I’m someone who can “help” from the outside because I think I’m somehow superior in my knowledge, wisdom and being and have something to offer. Heck no. But in a - I want to know this experience, be part of this, learn these people, believe in them, see them, and have them felt seen too.
Being truly seen, as you are, without someone desiring you to anything else other than who you are, anything more, is the ultimate empowerment.
It brought tears of gratitude to my eyes to witness Tre-Shaun for the fullness-of-life that he was.
Raf looked at me sympathetically after the words came out of my mouth, and turned back to playing with the kids.
I think in a normal circumstance, I would give myself a break about this, but I had just written 6000 words (less than 24 hours ago) about how I felt “home” for the first time in my life. So I was acutely aware of the irony.
But when we arrived at “The Cappy”. The Capricorn Hotel, just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, in the desert just outside of Newman. A fine establishment with cooling misters in the Beer Garden, perpetual happy hour, fluro workers everywhere, and $49 steaks. Which 5 years ago seemed ridiculously absurd, but somehow felt kind of normal this year. The bartender remembered us.
You lot are the ones who do the surfing in Broome, aren’t you?
It could have been Raf’s long hair, our cute kids, and the fact we were wearing boardshorts and beach dresses instead of Fluro?
But I realised I was experiencing that same sense of nostalgia I talked about in my last post. Reminded of a time once lived. I know this. I’m home.
There is so much power that comes from consistency.
That was a turning point in my anxious imagination about potential places to move to. That, and the next stop was Port Hedland, and there is no part of my soul that feels called to spend more than an hour travelling through there.
Of course, though, the joy, excitement and nostalgia of reaching The Dome Port Hedland for our “annual Dome cafe experience” was still there. The Dome is not exactly my favourite choice of cafe (IYKYK) but when you have travelled over 1800km in the desert, a waterfront cafe (albeit serenaded in diesel fumes from the great machine that is the Port) is pretty much the most exciting moment. Ever.
There is something really delicious about new experiences. But there is something adequately as delicious about familiar experiences, if you embrace it.
I remember the year that travelling to the Kimberley became familiar.
I thought that might be the last year we would ever go. I was not experiencing anything “new” by being there. There was no freshness to the experience. The things that used to inspire me in wonder, had lost my curiosity.
A slump.
The rose coloured glasses had worn off. Expectations crept in.
But I moved through this with awareness. Returning the following year, committed to renewing the lust and love post the honeymoon stage. The deepening I talked about in my last post, that comes from time and consistency. The depth that can only only be lived through many decades of marriage.
Even though I’m deeply inspired here, I know that it’s not my path to live full time in the Kimberley (despite thinking about it many times).
For an assortment of reasons. Even though it fulfils so much of my soul’s urges. Top End life. Tropical life. Life woven so innately into our indigenous Country and Culture.
I don’t like feeling like a “blow in”.
I don’t like feeling like a white tourist in a blak fella’s town, that’s been overlorded by many generations and iterations of colonialist industry.
I do like being innately part of things.
I do like feeling like I’m part of the solution, not the problem.
But I have to accept that I am these things, though. I am part of the problem in many ways, and that my impact here is felt in this way too.
Temporary, privileged, outsider, perpetuator.
Recognition of this is, at least, honouring the Truth of The Other.
I think we ought to all start being a little more honest with ourselves in that way.
We are all just fumbling our way through life, trying the best we can to figure things out. It’s okay. We aren’t “wrong”.
But I am wading through some inner exploration of this right now. I am confronted and conflicted in a way I haven’t felt before about my presence here. Before this, I was always certain what I was doing was essentially rooted in altruism, so it was “okay”.
I don’t have any solid “moral of the story” to leave with you here about this.
I’m just writing the thoughts as they come. Unfettered. Incomplete. Unanswered.
But I do know that when I was driving through town after the Night Markets the other night (a mostly white / tourist event), at the newly refurbished and developed Town Beach (which is absolutely amazing for my family, but stole the soul of what was there before), and I took a wrong turn, ending up in “Old Broome”, I looked at all the mob on the street and it just felt incommensurable.
Watching the mob walking about the streets, in this built up town, in the middle of the desert. It just didn’t make any sense.
Zooming out, and witnessing it all, it just didn’t make sense. It felt completely incongruent.
But here we are.
What a time in our evolution.
Processing, making sense of, recalibrating.
My journey to these lands now, aside from the intention of the actual programs we run, is less about my own experience, and instead about the wisdom and lived life that I can pass down to my children, who are already shaping the future.
The necessity for them to understand the culture and heritage of our land’s “first family”, as my 4 year old understands our First Nation Peoples. The necessity for them to connect to Country. To know raw wilderness. To know the Whole. To listen. To see.
To honour.
Perhaps I’l finish on a totally random reflection I had whilst driving up, as I observed some wild goats hunting about on the side of the road.
Imagine if that was your life?
Being a goat, at a red desert station.
Simply spending your days searching the lands for food and water in the heat, with not much else in between.
You are so small and insignificant in the wider picture of the landscape.
Your life doesn’t really add much value on any scale. You’re not really that important.
Actually, you’re probably having a mostly destructive impact to the natural lands.
What a very ordinary and insignificant life, hey?
It made me realise, we are kind of like these goats.
Except we mostly experience way more suffering.
But really, we’re all just wandering around doing our thing, and we’re not really that important in the grand scheme of things. Our world is our world. Their world is their world. We’re all just living in our own little worlds, doing our thing.
Sorry, not a very profound ending here, “we’re all just goats”. But I just had to share my moment of existentialism.
Maybe scroll up to the first paragraph about tracking and winds, if you want to circle back to a more poetic and juicy note about those ancient rememberings I alluded to in the title.
Until then.