Anti-Social Climbing

It's been nearly 18 months since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his sorry speech to the stolen generation and still, tourists are allowed to climb Uluru, which is a sacred site for local Aboriginal people.

This week a draft management plan has been released for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta national park, calling for, among other things, a ban on people climbing Uluru. The plan also points out the environmental impact of climbers, such as erosion along paths and the effect on wildlife of rubbish left behind.

Earlier this week, Julian Morrow from The Chaser dressed up in mountaineering gear and attempted to scale the spire of St John's Anglican Church in Canberra, where Prime Minister Rudd was giving an address and where he and his wife were married in 1981.

When it was reported in the news, The Chaser's stunt was called inappropriate and of poor taste.

But why? Because spiritual sites should not be climbed?

We Walked

Today PJ and I joined the Great Dividing Trail Association on their last walk of the year. We met at 8am for breakfast inside the volcanic crater of Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) and then walked 14 km to the picnic spot, a beautiful bend on the Jim Crow Creek.

Our walk leader, the very knowledgeable and very lovely Barry Golding stopped us every so often to talk about our surrounds; geologically, archeologically and historically in terms of the land's original owners, the Djadjawurrrung.

While several of us pooled our food for lunch, Barry asked us what we had learnt.

I learned, among other things, about Murnyong, also called the yam daisy; a perennial herb similar to radish in shape that was a preferred food of the Aborigines in central and western Victoria. I learned that I don't like what wearing hats does to the acoustics of how my voice sounds. I learned that some people are happy to talk about their limps and some are not. I learned that lines in rocks in Australia run North South. I learned that sharing food with people is one of the best things you can do.

The Tall Man

I finished reading this book a couple of days ago but wanted to blog about it today on November 19, exactly four years after Cameron Doomadgee's death, the event around which this book is based. He died while in police custody on Palm Island, an Aboriginal community off the north east coast of Australia.

Doomadgee was arrested one morning for drunkenly swearing at the tall policeman Christopher Hurley. Forty minutes later he was dead.

I share journalist Mark Dapin's sentiment:

This book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's pointless death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology. Every sentence is weighty, considered, even, restrained. Every character is explored for their contradictions, every situation observed for its nuances, every easy judgement suspended... It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, the living and the dead.

I read this book in a few days, a testament to the absorbing story but more so to Hooper's writing. She is present in the narrative but never intrudes. She provides just enough space – between the protagonists' motivation and her own – for readers to inhabit and make up their own minds.

It's not a space I want to inhabit. It's not a series of events I enjoyed reading about. But as a white Australian I feel it is a history that I cannot turn away from just because it makes me feel uncomfortable, just because it makes me feel ashamed.

Earlier this year Kevin Rudd formally apologised to indigenous Australians. His speech began:

I move that today we honour the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment.

The Prime Minister's apology for past cruelties was way overdue. But what of the mistreatments that are ongoing? Or is that the subtext of Hooper's book's title? The tall man, aka the middle finger, extended.

Truganini

I spent the majority of yesterday afternoon clicking refresh on the New York Times website to get updated voting results. And as the perfect antidote I spent the whole of today with my hands in the soil.

Our trees don't care about Bush. Our worms don't understand red and blue States. Our hens can't tell the difference between Tina Fey and Sarah Palin. Our seedlings aren't interested in the significance of an African American president.

Our earth does so much, but knows nothing about our hierarchies of dominance and enslavement. It has no fists to fight back, no voice to yell stop, no feet to kick out in defence.

I felt inside the earth today, my hands ache from their digging.

Yesterday I was gloating and global, today I am soil-coloured and voiceless just as Truganini was before her bones were stolen and exhibited as testament to something that reviled her.