Cape York Peninsula

May 28, 2014

Expectations

When I arrived for my first agency nurse contract on Badu island in the Torres Strait I wasn’t aware of having any expectations. My main thought was that I was having an adventure. After a day or two I realized I was waiting for “something” to happen. Maybe shouting in the street, or some other type of sudden violence. The Cape York community I’d worked in for two years experienced a high level of violent outbursts. Raised voices in the streets were often the background noise to every other day. I had been initially shocked at that, but by the time I left I had grown accustomed to it.

The Cape York community was my first experience in working as a remote area nurse. I learnt my emergency skills there and began to have some understanding of the health and social difficulties of Indigenous people living in traditional lands. I didn’t know, though, that I expected every group of Indigenous people to be similar. Leaving the place I knew and arriving to work on a small island, my first lesson was about my own expectations. The fact that I had them, and that they were wrong.Since then I have worked almost two years in various Torres islands and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard shouting in a street. Becoming aware of my expectations and letting them go is a lifetime’s work. I learnt after those first few days to be more open to what I actually saw and heard instead of living from my assumptions. And I’ve been constantly and wonderfully surprised at the differences within Australian Indigenous cultures and individual people.

January 9, 2014

When the Sun goes Down…

Have you ever had the experience of a few simple words changing your life? I have, over five years ago sitting on a red Weston’s flour drum at the landing in Aurukun, Fasi was sitting next to me watching local women fish as the November sun set. They were his words, “In my country we have a saying, when the sun goes down it’s the end of the day.” He first spoke them softly in Samoan and I thought I’d never heard anything so wise and sweet. I won’t tell you the rest of the story, except to say, I can still hear the whispered words in my imagination and their simplicity still makes me smile and it’s become a joke between us. I fell in love with him that evening.

January 4, 2014

Odd Friends

When you find yourself in a remote place you welcome any overtures of friendship. loneliness, culture shock and generally figuring out how you’re going to fill in the hours after work can be quite a challenge.

A sulphur-crested cockatoo befriended Fasi and I one afternoon. It was sitting on the guttering of the clinic building just above our heads, leaning over peering at us as we talked. When we walked the hundred or so metres home along the red dirt track, it flew through the gum trees, over our heads and landed on the metal railing outside the kitchen, loudly calling “hello”. It must have once been someone’s pet, although we never found out whose, and it never ventured far from the back verandah and it’s water and sunflower seed tray, from the day it arrived till the day we left.

I loved that bird, it brought another dimension to the harsh life I was experiencing in Aurukun. Just watching it waddle about on the railing or wandering into the house made me smile.

December 5, 2013

First RAN Christmas

My first remote area nurse Christmas was in Aurukun 2008. Well….it was meant to be, but I ended up flying to Townsville for a CT scan of my right wrist. All the preparations were made….I had tinsel, lights and decorations posted from home. My then 16 year old daughter was flying up for two weeks, presents bought from before I ran away from home and ready to post from the top of Cape York and all the ingredients I needed for a boiled fruitcake were in the local store. I was set to enjoy a tropical wet season Christmas in the middle of “nowhere”.

But late one afternoon my desire to explore got the better of me. My daughter, Fasi and I walked about an hour along a bush track next to the Archer river…admiring the lush growth of pandanus on one side of the red dirt and mangroves on the other. I walked in the middle while the other two talked….suddenly they were still talking and I was flat on my back in sticky mud….trying not to make a fuss about the sharp pain in my wrist. They helped me to my feet as if I was an old woman, made a few jokes and wondered if we should keep walking or return home. The clouds were darkening and the tide was washing across the river bank. We pressed on, only, to be soon drenched in a heavy shower of rain. Fasi took that opportunity to closely peer into the water looking for fish, then made a hasty repair to an old net hanging in a tree while Mel and I were shivering with cold and water dripped off our noses and down our backs.

We walked home in semi-darkness feeling a bond forged by the experience….still making jokes! We still talk about it five years later as if it was a big adventure.

My arm was plastered back at the clinic, Fasi flew back to Brisbane, we enjoyed a clinic Christmas party and a few days of the house being lit up, then flew to join the family in Townsville. It was Christmas with a difference alright and one of the most memorable.

November 10, 2013

Arriving

100_0035Arriving somewhere new, for a holiday or work or to meet someone is often accompanied by varying emotions and have layers of meanings. I’ve often people watched at airports and wondered what was going on in different people’s lives at the time. Airports and train stations are places of transition, arrivals and departures are portals into another life and with any journey the traveller never really knows how their lives are going to be affected by their destination.

When my partner arrived in Aurukun, a few months before me and before I even knew that he existed he wrote in his diary after landing “This is a strange place.” A short sentence but filled with many meanings that he was yet to discover, as would I too, months later.

On the 1st September 2008 and a few hours after landing in Aurukun this is partly what I wrote in my diary:

“I flew into Aurukun today, the first day of Spring. From the sky the area around is criss-crossed by dirt roads and rivers. Dense bushland, small fires spiralling up smoke, odd patches of semi-cleared ground…and still more flying time left. How far away is this place I’ve come to work in at the top of Cape York. I have no idea what to expect. I don’t know what my curiosity has landed me in this time. A place I’ve never heard of and couldn’t even find on the map. I don’t know what a paediatric nurse is doing in a place like this. I climbed down the stairs of the plane and walked into thick heat, dust and dark-skinned faces tinted dusty red by the gritty wind. There were people everywhere, standing about, shouting, waiting, kids on bikes, skinny, mangy dogs and police checking bags for alcohol…while I waited my turn to have my bags searched curiosity dissipated the shock of strangeness.”

We both described Aurukun as strange immediately on arrival. I felt afraid, Fasi was intrigued, we told each other months later. It was a place like no other we’d ever seen, nothing in my experience as an Australian prepared me for it and certainly nothing in Fasi’s experience as a Samoan had even come close. Neither of us had a clue how our lives would change after the long journey there.

Perhaps there’s more than one reason people feel apprehension at the beginning of a journey, for themselves or those close to them. And maybe it’s not always the hope for a physically safe trip…it’s because travelling and arriving has the potential to change our lives. There’s no guarantee that the person who arrived will be the same when they’re ready to depart.

The photo here is of the airport shelter at Aurukun place of so many arrivals and departures and in the wet season, the only way of entry.