Almost daily, I find one or more of these muthas lying on the grass, or squashing some poor fellow plant or an item of garden furniture.
I drag them around the corner of our house and add them to this pile - a spectacle I have seen beside many local homes:
In most parts of the world, leaves falls gently, soundlessly, and can be tidied up with rakes before rotting into mulch. In Darwin, massive palm fronds tear away at the base without warning. (If you hear a ripping sound from above, drop your G&T and move! Once one of these landed on a chair - thankfully empty - that I'd placed beside the pool only hours beforehand). Their fibrous forms will take forever to decompose, so they are disposed of with the help of a mulching machine - a long, noisy and sweaty business.
Quite possibly because I'm not the one who does the mulching, I find something delightfully exotic - and satisfying - in clearing up massive palm fronds from around our home. For starters, the place looks so much tidier after a few minutes of effort. "Look at me, gardening!", I chuckle to myself. Wrestling croc-length pieces of dead tree (muttering "You call that a leaf? This is a leaf!"), I am reminded that in the tropics, there's no pretence of an even contest between humankind and nature. Round here, even plants don't do things by halves.
Last weekend the guys and I hired a four wheel drive, packed our camping gear and set off with three other families to the Walking with Spirits festival. The Beswick Aboriginal Community are Jawoyn people who live around 100 km south east of Katherine. Members of the general public are granted entry to this land only once each year, when a limited number of tickets are sold to the festival. The event culminates in a show that combines corroboree, story-telling, fire displays and other performance styles, presented at a sacred site known as Malkgulumbu. At this beautiful location – accessible only via a rough four wheel drive track – the bush gives way to a lake. The stage is erected on the sand, with the water behind it and a backdrop formed by the tall rock faces that border the opposite bank. Stage lights splash the cliffs with shapes and colours after the orange hues drawn out by sunset fade away.
This year’s show starts with a series of corroboree-style dances. To the accompaniment of clapping sticks and didgeridoo, members of the audience are encouraged to join local people of all ages as they kick and sway across the sand. After this there is talk, more music, an animation. Then a group of middle aged and elderly women come onto the stage and sit down cross-legged. Colourful dresses and shocks of frizzy white hair stand out under the stage lights. Expecting a traditional song, I am startled to hear the opening bars of the Beatles’ ‘Golden Slumbers’.
I fell in love with the Beatles backwards, when, as a teenager, I discovered my father’s old vinyl copy of ‘Abbey Road’- the last album they recorded. From the first shuffling beats of ‘Come Together’, I was hooked. I would shut myself away in the lounge room of our house in suburban Canberra, put the needle on the record, lie down on the couch and lose myself. This ritual was reserved for evenings, as I had decided that it was an album best listened to around sunset.
Side 2 of ‘Abbey Road’ is mostly comprised of a medley - brief snatches of songs that, threaded together, somehow create a compelling whole. The original of ‘Golden Slumbers’ is only about 90 seconds long, but under a chilly dry season sky the song is instantly recognisable, even with George Martin’s artifice and McCartney’s distinctive vocals stripped away. The women’s singing has a raw, nasal quality. "Once there was a way to get back homeward, once there was a way to get back home, sleep pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby...". Soon the women introduce lyrics in their own tongue, creating new verses, moving from one language to the other and back again. Then a group of children appears and parades in front of the stage holding up models of sea-creatures made of foil, with long silver tails dangling and sparkling behind.
I wonder how the women of Beswick took this little tune into their hearts. By Beatles standards, the song is obscure - it's not one that gets played on the radio. However they came to know it, they have made it their own. At the opening of the show, the MC told us that music has been performed at this site for tens of thousands of years, and asked us to acknowledge the spirits of these departed musicians. As ‘Golden Slumbers’ shifts between languages I think of George Harrison, dying of cancer in a Hollywood mansion, and of John Lennon, stepping out the front door of the Dakota building to his doom. I wonder what they would make of this moment. I like to think that they would enjoy it very much. I can’t help imagining their spirits and those of a couple of ancient local elders standing up the back watching the show, then meeting each others’ eyes across the heads of the crowd and smiling.
And for a moment – no more than the flick of a silver fish tail - I feel like I catch hold of something. Something more than just ‘music brings us together’. Something about there being feelings of such subtlety that they escape the grasp of language - and render it unecessary. Something about the little miracle of a suburban teenage girl and an elderly Jawoyn woman both being able to spot the genius in a quirky suite of music created by some Liverpudlians. And something oddly hopeful in their shared view that it is suited to the time around sunset.
Beside every footpath in Darwin at the moment, frangipanis lie in the mud. This strikes me as a visual metaphor for my year in 2011.
I proposed yesterday afternoon that my husband and sons should accompany me to the Northern Territory Football League grand final. The Tiwi Bombers Aussie Rules team (who hail from indigenous communities on Bathurst and Melville Islands, known collectively as the Tiwi Islands, about two hours by ferry from Darwin) had a shot at their first premiership. It didn’t take much arm-twisting to convince the guys that it would be fun to see if they could pull it off. Storm clouds roiled overhead and we were dumped on by a quick, intense downpour shortly before the game began. We are now local enough to take such things in our soggy stride.
After being behind for much of the game, the Bombers had a brilliant last quarter, and when the siren blew the mellow tones of their club song 'Japparika' (by theTiwi band B2M – I presume this is a reference to Bathurst and Melville) wafted around the stadium.
And I sat there in my squelchy thongs, eating horrible stadium food with my blokes, cheering surreptitiously (we somehow managed to sit in Nightcliff fan territory), and felt blessedly normal for a while. As a final benediction, I was pooed on by a low-flying bat. Strange as it may sound, such moments are precious.
Darwin has just been downgraded from a 'Cyclone Warning' that led to a day off school for the boys. As a storm roared its way over our house yesterday afternoon, my 11 year old son reflected that he has come to enjoy a proper wet season deluge. I acknowledged that I felt the same way. I like to keep the verandah-facing windows open, to best enjoy the defeaningness of it. This is no mere 'rain'. It is surely drawn to earth by a force stronger than gravity.
Standing on the verandah this morning, the wall of falling water made me feel like I was in a cubby house, and the palm trees looked like dancers tossing their skirts.
And that was when things were just getting started, before the verandah became too rainswept to stand on. The doors inside our house have hooks on the back, so you can prevent them slamming shut when the wet season winds rush through. Time to hook back some doors, make a cuppa, turn off the drowned-out radio and enjoy the show.
