Alone.
All alone.
Its further neighbour West stood at Yuendamu three hundred kilometers away. Sixty North at Tea Tree were others. East along the Barkley, maybe 250k., a few more. On the outskirts of the Alice, eighty South, was its genus in a diaspora of blue glowing prototypes that lit the Stuart Highway into and through the town then out again into the desert.
A street light! A bloody street light! A bloody street light in the bloody desert!
Tapering up from the base it sprouted the sealed halogen unit about a foot below the top. Maybe the size of a large baking dish shiny and unused. As crowning glory the solar panel down-tilted slightly and turned East-West.
It was in the semi-arid desert on the stock route that wound South to North or vice-versa depending on whether you were coming or going. No longer used for feeding or watering stock this narrow strip of land had been claimed by the Arrernte people under THE ACT .
Like the whitefeller resort Yulara at Uluru it was probably designed in a highrise office overlooking the harbour at North Sydney by a yuppie brainstormer who had one similar outside his Paddington renovated terrace homestead or weekend hideaway.
More than like his mother walked into one similar when he was a month off gestation. Its image was firmly impregnated into the retentive lobes of his brain.
Bringing the latest technology to brighten the lives of the family of, at present, twenty or more who lived in the tin sheds upon which it was supposed to caste its mock lunar rays .
This tall Cleopatra's needle actually surveyed the detrius of survival of the old people and their descendents driven from this country, some fifty years before, by the antecedents of those who still occupy Yamba homestead about ten kilometers East.
The multithousand acre property held on a hundred year lease, poor country for cattle though it was, had brought lifes comforts to one small family of three generations and devastation, poverty, sickness and death to the other.
The ultimate in black/white contrast.
And this camp on the stock route was yet another stop on the long road home. 'AND WE KEEP ON FIGHTING AND WE KEEP ON COMING.'
Kids crippled bicycles, decapitated dolls. Shreds of comics and broken toy assault weapons. A more than crippled motor with two flat tyres sunk deep in sand while its unparallel side was supported by battered jerry cans. Robbed of its offside wheels, distributor, one back mudguard, its front-end and other normally vital components of a cars anatomy it was quite dead.
Torn mattresses, tattered blankets, empty food cartons and the other kind. Tins and bottles and the ubiquitous plastic.
Further out the people built bush wind breaks, the tin sheds.
Home.
Look how far we have come the solar panel was saying to the light. We cost something like ten thousand dollars to end up here. Do they appreciate it?
Not likely, said its gloomy companion. And those stinking dogs keep pissing on my feet came the interpolation from the pole.
Then the solar said they even reckon they could have bought three generators with the money. Even one would be more useful than us. Ungrateful bastards.
That night a full, glowing, Centre moon cast a splendour so that the waving coolibahs and squat mulgas moved through and around each other exchanging shadows. As they had always done.
And the one with power to turn tides, send yuppies around the twist, as well as light the way without outside help for the desert traveller, grinned down at this foolishness and the pitchblack blindness of those who will not see. It seemed to be saying that those who talk reconciliation talk bullshit.
There's a punch line to all this.
IT DIDN'T WORK!
All alone.
Its further neighbour West stood at Yuendamu three hundred kilometers away. Sixty North at Tea Tree were others. East along the Barkley, maybe 250k., a few more. On the outskirts of the Alice, eighty South, was its genus in a diaspora of blue glowing prototypes that lit the Stuart Highway into and through the town then out again into the desert.
A street light! A bloody street light! A bloody street light in the bloody desert!
Tapering up from the base it sprouted the sealed halogen unit about a foot below the top. Maybe the size of a large baking dish shiny and unused. As crowning glory the solar panel down-tilted slightly and turned East-West.
It was in the semi-arid desert on the stock route that wound South to North or vice-versa depending on whether you were coming or going. No longer used for feeding or watering stock this narrow strip of land had been claimed by the Arrernte people under THE ACT .
Like the whitefeller resort Yulara at Uluru it was probably designed in a highrise office overlooking the harbour at North Sydney by a yuppie brainstormer who had one similar outside his Paddington renovated terrace homestead or weekend hideaway.
More than like his mother walked into one similar when he was a month off gestation. Its image was firmly impregnated into the retentive lobes of his brain.
Bringing the latest technology to brighten the lives of the family of, at present, twenty or more who lived in the tin sheds upon which it was supposed to caste its mock lunar rays .
This tall Cleopatra's needle actually surveyed the detrius of survival of the old people and their descendents driven from this country, some fifty years before, by the antecedents of those who still occupy Yamba homestead about ten kilometers East.
The multithousand acre property held on a hundred year lease, poor country for cattle though it was, had brought lifes comforts to one small family of three generations and devastation, poverty, sickness and death to the other.
The ultimate in black/white contrast.
And this camp on the stock route was yet another stop on the long road home. 'AND WE KEEP ON FIGHTING AND WE KEEP ON COMING.'
Kids crippled bicycles, decapitated dolls. Shreds of comics and broken toy assault weapons. A more than crippled motor with two flat tyres sunk deep in sand while its unparallel side was supported by battered jerry cans. Robbed of its offside wheels, distributor, one back mudguard, its front-end and other normally vital components of a cars anatomy it was quite dead.
Torn mattresses, tattered blankets, empty food cartons and the other kind. Tins and bottles and the ubiquitous plastic.
Further out the people built bush wind breaks, the tin sheds.
Home.
Look how far we have come the solar panel was saying to the light. We cost something like ten thousand dollars to end up here. Do they appreciate it?
Not likely, said its gloomy companion. And those stinking dogs keep pissing on my feet came the interpolation from the pole.
Then the solar said they even reckon they could have bought three generators with the money. Even one would be more useful than us. Ungrateful bastards.
That night a full, glowing, Centre moon cast a splendour so that the waving coolibahs and squat mulgas moved through and around each other exchanging shadows. As they had always done.
And the one with power to turn tides, send yuppies around the twist, as well as light the way without outside help for the desert traveller, grinned down at this foolishness and the pitchblack blindness of those who will not see. It seemed to be saying that those who talk reconciliation talk bullshit.
There's a punch line to all this.
IT DIDN'T WORK!
