The Hobo Gobbelins

To celebrate (almost) completion of my accordion repair project. Skyler Fell is an accordion repairperson I met in San Francisco about 5 years ago, during the Trans* Pride march and also later we got to have a hoedown with several members of Hobo Gobbelins playing around a bonfire at the 5th Avenue Marina.

Zeks

Just before Consumermass we found out about a party up in the hills that some of my old poet friends were playing at… we blagged a lift with Schmickey and headed out. More reunions, a big house up in the jarrah-blanketed hills. Zeks blew us away.

You can see their website here which has music and reviews etc or go to their myspace.

Watch Thieves - Holy Medal

Yesterday we got a letter in the mail. Scotland! Unwrap it, quickly: a letter, a drawing, a cd… our friends are spread far and wide, and they send us pieces of their lives. I wanted to upload the whole cd because it’s so beautiful. Compelling, impulsive listening. But I’m settling for one of the new songs, “Holy Medal”.

What I don’t know is: are they cunning sneaky takers of timepieces, or addicted to CCTV?

Last I knew, Watch Thieves is comprised of the incredible incomparable Sharon, Michael and Lucy. Tornstrings has played many a show with Watch Thieves, who used to be known as “Insecurity Front” and are playing around Edinburgh. We love you, Watch Thieves.

RUMSKULL: To HELL with the law!

Thanks to Pirate Grrbeard, Pirate Jim, Captain Hooknose, Sever’d Hood, Malacca NeverStraight, & Festy Fanny for the excellent night. NYE can be so disappointing, but this time as we walked through the almost-empty streets of Freo at 3am with a fresh carton on Grrbeard’s shoulders I thought “Not bad, 2012, let’s see what else you’ve got for us…”

RUMSKULL: The Captain Says…

My old friends Rumskull kindly took me aboard for the last night of 2011, to be spent on a drunken pirate ship entertaining a bunch of scantily clad yuppies in Fremantle. Honestly, girls in g-strings: think carefully before participating in a limbo contest.

Thunderstorms in suburbia

It’s a strange dreamy process, coming home. Especially when it takes 9 months to get there. I’ve been reflecting on the storm of feelings that have been bombarding me since I got back, and doing some writing… something may come of it. Let me know if you want to read it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hanging out with these amazing friends of mine, and though so many years have passed it feels as if it was just last week that I saw them last. It’s such a solid feeling, to have known and loved people for a long time, and I really missed that when I lived in scotland.

My thoughts are still too nebulous to condense into a tumblr entry. Wrinkles, babies, new buildings here and old favourites gone, the trees are taller - much taller, my friends have different teeth and different hair and new children (and some of their kids are now sending me emails), and my parents have a new dog. Perth is really expensive, busking in Freo isn’t as sweet as it used to be, and Junkadelic (a community arts percussion group I was part of for a long time) is having its 10th anniversary next week. Holy shit.

It’s funny the things that other people remember. Charlotte’s memory is astonishing. She remembers an embarassing array of things, from when we lived together in 2000 and 2001… and she’s not afraid to remind me! Brad and Charlotte and I were all in the same room for the first time since 2001 (or was it 2002?) and the universe didn’t explode. But it was amazing, to think about the years and distance travelled in those years…

We drove down south in the New Year, after playing a show with the fabulous Rumskull. More on that later. But packed up a sleepy James and Joey and drove down to Denmark, against the flow of the NYE holidayers. It was a hot day which turned abruptly cold when we reached Mt Barker and turned off the highway… Being in the ghostly tall Karri again… Watching the rough Southern Ocean batter the granite rocks at Williams Bay… Walking with Mel and Luca around the big bushfire from last November watching the new shoots burst through blackened trunks, breathing in the smell of ash and eucalyptus… I even got a job making coffee for a few hours at the Denmark Art Markets before we headed north to stay at Olly’s place in Donnelly River, where the kangaroos and emus are so tame that they steal food from your table.

The Pinnacles

I remember going to the Pinnacles as a kid, and wandering around this patch of yellow-sand desert poking up out of the coastal scrub, filled with eerie rocks that were much bigger than me… a place to lose yourself in, to watch the shadows grow longer and the patterns of the wind on the sand. We were always told that they were fossilised trees, which had decayed and filled with a harder substance (calcrete) than the limestone surrounding them. Nyungar people told me it’s a punishment place, where a family who broke Law in a big way were punished by being turned into stone. Other people who broke Law were sent to spend time there, amongst the frozen remnants of their ancestors. 

Whatever the cause of these strange spooky rocks, they’re beautiful in a slow and deep kind of way. We arrived just at sunset, and Joey raced off towards the sun as the shadows turned the yellow sand into gray. We followed the tracks of other humans and animals among the rocks and mounds of sand, and Joey and I walked through the gathering darkness back to meet Jean and drive into the night.

Hutt River Province

We began our day by greeting the aggressive blue-tongues on the side of the road. They growled at our car as we travelled up the dusty back roads towards The Principality of Hutt River. The PHR seceded from Australia on 21st April 1970, and has fought several legal struggles to maintain its autonomy. Their rebellion began with harsh restrictions on wheat quotas which would have seen only a tiny fraction of their year’s harvest accepted for sale by the Wheat Board, effectively bankrupting them. The Casley family decided that the Wheat Quota Bill was unjust, and challenged the ruling, which lead to several new Laws being made in the West Australian govenment, including that which allowed for the government to resume agricultural lands, which the Casley family took as a direct threat.

So, they seceded and got along with the busy work of creating laws, flags, various heraldic shields and also started printing their own stamps. These stamps are truly beautiful: they have printed stamps since 1970 and Joey & I spent ages looking through their collection. Some were designed by Prince Leonard and Princess Shirley’s daughter, and featured native wildlife and flora. Princess Shirley herself showed us around, and stamped Jean’s passport with the official PHR stamps. We took a look around their dusty fading museum, at their impressive collection of photos and books featuring heraldry, and at their Pyramid which is used to charge crystals. Princess Shirley was charming, and while we were there we saw quite a few other tourists poking around and getting their photos taken with the Princess… We sat in the garden and wrote postcards which were placed in envelopes then stamped with PHR stamps on the back. The local Australia Post office puts Australian stamps onto the front of the envelopes…

Broome to Kalbarri

We spent a couple of lovely days staying with Shelley and her daughters Tya and Kiara. Mangos dripping from the trees, Sophia was screenprinting hundreds of “Hands off the Kimberley” t-shirts in the backyard and there was Jael and family living around the corner. Too sad, we packed up for the epic drive to the Pilbara.

We missed visiting my cousins in Karratha by a day, and had to find a place to stay. Full moon, and we found a beautiful bay to set up camp in somewhere between Karratha and Dampier. The sides of the bay were huge mounds of those pindan-red rocks. We scrambled up to watch the moonrise, and poked around looking for rock art (the Burrup Peninsula is famous for having the largest rock art gallery in the world, mostly etchings into rocks) but didn’t find any. After a delightful dinner and a bit of a snooze we were again woken up by bogans and decided to cut our losses and move camps. They tried to convince us to stay, but their channel-flicking DJ style was too much to cope with and we hit the road again, sleeping at some roadside rest stop somewhere on the way to Exmouth.

Exmouth… we were back in the sea. Swimming the famous Ningaloo reef, with sharks and parrotfish and hundreds of other snorkellers… Windy as all hell but SO worth it. We spent 2 days there, then headed down to Shark Bay… Jean took us to visit the dolphins at Monkey Mia where the baby dolphin’s out-of-control dives cracked us up, and Joey followed a slow but stately bungarra to its hiding place under the boardwalk. We paid a quick visit to the Stromatolites: the oldest living species on earth. They look a bit like rocks, but the incredible thing was seeing that the damage caused to the living rocks by wagons and horses can still be seen today; a hundred years later the tracks are as clear as ever.

More and more driving… until we finally reached Kalbarri. We walked the gorges, sat high in the wind on the striated rocks and dreamed about cooler days for hiking. We watched snakes cross dirt roads, and stopped to chat with the blue-tongued lizards by the side of the road in the mornings.

Walmadanj

We dropped by the camps out at Walmadanj (also known as James Price Point) to offer our solidarity with the Traditional Owners and the protesters camped out there trying to stop work on Woodside’s mega gas hub. We walked on the ancient reef literally in the fossilised footprints of dinosaurs. Joey went on a bushwalk looking for signs of endangered bilbies - recently captured on video in the area. We ate turtle and goanna cooked up by the family. We met up with old friends, and met a bunch of lovely and very dedicated people, some of whom were planning to spend the wet season living out there to make sure nothing dodgy happened during the off season.

It’s a beautiful place, and the people who were sacrificing their daily comforts to live out at the camps were impressively strong and passionate about what they were doing to prevent the destruction of that special place. At the road camp, Black Tank, people blockaded the road twice a day to hold up the shift changeovers.

The Traditional Owners of the place were very welcoming despite the briefness of our visit. There’s been some good news about the struggle, and you can find out more at Hands Off Country and The Wilderness Society.

This photo is from the Hands Off Country website.

Countries we visited on the way home…

Driving on… a lady in the op shop in Katherine gave me a free shirt when I told her I needed one to keep the sun off (it had a wee stain). We came back the next day after swimming in Katherine Gorge for the $5 bag sail…

From Katherine we set off west at last, driving all day to the Keep River National Park and then on to the border, where we had to rapidly consume all the rest of our fresh fruit & veg. We had run out of Free Mango Heaven by then but made a big stew with many carrots in it… had to restock in Kununurra (expensive) before heading to Purnululu.

Purnululu road truly tested our 4wd skills. Many creek crossings, lots of big rocky roads and blind corners. Our Beast (Nissan patrol) made it fine. We walked up cathedral gorge, where we hung out for ages watching a goanna while Joey walked around in the sun like a mad tourist. It was very hot. Clouds gathered, and by the time we’d had our lunch outside Echidna gorge it had started to sprinkle. Joey & I went in for a look but didn’t make it far before the sprinkle turned into a downpour. We sheltered in a cave for a while, watchful for signs of flash flooding. As soon as a trickle started past our refuge we ran back to the carpark… Jean drove us out through the suddenly flooding dry creek beds and across many kilometres of dust-turned-to-mud. We were treated to the sight of waterfalls pouring from every crevice of the Bungle Bungles: what was parched and dry became an oasis. The wet season arriving early?

A day or two later we made it to Tunnel Creek, after unfortunately camping with bogans on holidays at a lovely quarry (the bogans played shitty music very loud, and were pretty rude about a polite request to drop the volume…). Anyway Tunnel Creek National Park has a huge cave in it - Western Australia’s oldest - 750m through the remains of a reef from Devonian times (that’s extremely old, guys). The reefs are limestone and apparently packed with fossils though we didn’t notice any. The tunnel creek cave was also used as a hideout by Jandamarra, an Aboriginal resistance fighter. According to the history written in the park, Jandamarra had once been a tracker employed by the police who’d had to bring in some of his people who were wanted for fighting resistance, or “stealing” livestock. He set them free, and shot a policeman, and became a fugitive. Weirdly I remember a giraffe at Perth Zoo being named after him?

We had an excellent time there (it was very cool inside, very very hot outside) wading through the pools of water to get through the cave. Definite signs of freshwater crocodiles turned into definite sighting when out of the darkness came a terrible growling from only about 2m away from me as Joey and I were up to the waist in water… The croc thankfully just buggered off and left us to traverse the rest of the way in fear… it was big for a freshie, about 2m long!

Litchfield & Kakadu

Incredible places. Driving through the hot days, in our huge 4wd. walking down into rocky gorges, to find clear cold water, fresh and sweet. Sitting in waterfalls. The smell of eucalypt forests. Cockatoos, goannas, bungarras, wallabies, magpie geese, lily walkers, snakes. Art painted on the walls thousands of years ago.

Cooking on a campfire. Kangaroo, deep-fried avocado, curry, falafel.

The thin walls of our mosquito-mesh keeping us safe from the millions of bloodsuckers. Every breath of breeze longed for in the heat & humidity. The milky way stretched glistening across the blackness of space. Stories to tell…