Monkeyrockworld

They walk around with jerky movements, barefoot and wearing scruffy clothes. They stroll on the sidewalk in menacing groups of people and it seems like they don’t belong to this world. They don’t want your flesh tough… they want your money. And it’s never enough. If you give them a hand, they’ll try to rip off your whole arm. And this is so sad because their heritage hides one of the most interesting cultures and ideas I’ve ever came across with. Yes, I am talking about living dead but it’s not the type you can see in a George Romero’s movie, it’s… aboriginal people in Australia.
Before I get scolded and mugged for what I’m saying, I have to point out that this is just a recollection of ideas I got simply observing them from the windows of my workplace, where a bunch of them use to gather in a park. As Chatwin was saying, their skin is a smoky black, the color of despair. Sadness. No future. They seem to be absorbed in a timeless dimension where it’s impossible to tell what’s right from what’s wrong. They walk the Earth as a mass of disoriented, tired, uncaring shadows of human beings. It really struck me how they seem not to care about integration, creating their own segregation.

The Northern Territory is and always has been the part of Australia where the majority of aboriginal people are living, like a huge vertical container of indigenous ethnicity. Arnhem Land stays to the east of the Top End like a huge spot radiating east of Kakadu National Park, containing what’s probably the real leftover of Aboriginal life and culture in the country. Or at least, one of its vital lungs. I can’t tell anything about that because if you can go there, it’s because you are taking part of an expensive tour, and therefore you’re probably escorted by a guide who’ll prevent you to really get in touch with the people, some sort of tour of Tibet in China, without the police officers. What I dont understand still is why these people can’t interact with white society and result in a joke of their own great and interesting culture. If I think of the myth of the Songlines, and then I look at the scruffy Tiwi Islander that every night comes in the pizza place to beg for leftovers of food or burnt pizzas we’d throw away anyways, yellow bags under his eyes, face glowing in the aftermath of a glorious and constant drunkness, I feel like this shouldn’t exist. because its not just one of them. It’s mostly ALL of them. Women walking around with ultrathin limbs, grasping for something in the air, speaking many languages at the same time, bodies falling apart for the abuse and the misuse, wrapped inside clothes with floreal compositions that look like funeral dresses. They’re too thin to make a stand against the hot air, and too vacuous to exist in the real dimension. It’s like a kyte made of very thin paper, it flies but it spins over all the time, because it can’t fight the blow of the air.

What I sense is that behind those eyes there is no space for any kind of awkwardness for their own condition: they just wanna take, take and take more from you, and when you give, it’s never enough. They ask with rude, rusty voices corrugated by years of cigarette abuse, and when you give, it’s like you didn’t do anything, because you owe them your own existence and life. Your own self depends on them because they are the owners of the Land you walk on, and therefore, they deserve to eat your brains. I don’t want to get into the complicated political and social issues here, I am just trying to describe a condition that really saddens me. During my travels in the USA I came across a few Native Indians, and what sets them apart is the fact that, from a common background of painful eradication from their own land, they still have pride, and they have respect for their own history, race and condition. You don’t see them as trashed and corrupted as the aboriginal people are. You can’t see that dead light at the very back of their eyes, like their brains were switched off, in a stand by mode. Passive for life. You can still see the fierceness of a warrior people back there trying to fight and mingle with the white supremacy that was forced upon them.

It’s not the case in Darwin, and Alice Springs, Tennants Creek, Ti Tree, Katherine and all the other cities and  one horse towns I’ve visited in the NT. Here it’s like someone opened up the gates of hell, and let the dead loose. The tribal aspect of their culture gets mingled and smashed by the totally unappropriate urban setting surrounding them and they are left there strolling around like doomed souls. And this really really saddens me, because the contact is possible, but rarely makes any bloody sense. Unless you are scoring for dope, maybe. They’re the underbelly of a secret society of vice and even between each other there is disgregation, blank looks, booze induced lobotomy. So I ask myself if this is what is worth when society takes its toll over somebody’s else land, and if the laughable attempt to give these people money to integrate them is actually functioning in Australian society. Of course its clear that not all of them decided to walk the destruction path, but what I generally see is a confused mingling of worlds that don’t want to walk together. Like giving the dog a plastic bone… but where is the real one? Where it could sink its teeth in? This is just a thought of confused lines, maybe just to fill in a post, maybe for the pure sake of getting those images out of my eyes, because they hurt to see. The Land of the Dead.

If you liked this, please read similar interesting articles:

• The Age of Superpizza (4)
• From Alice to Darwin and the end of my trip (8)
• Captain Findus left the boat (1)
• After reaching Brisbane, looking back at the first half of the trip (3)