We spent three of our four weeks in Oz away from Sydney. Sydney is a magical place, too. The harbour is indescribable, so I won't bother. It is like all the photographs and films you have seen of the place, times 10. Nothing prepares you for its size, beauty and grandeur. It fair dinkum takes your breath away, as they actually do say down under.
Back with the group we formed a convoy and headed out of Sydney into the interior. Down the Parametta Road, past the Orange Order of New South Wales Charity Shop, over the Blue Mountains, for three hours to go through a town called Orange. There is no getting away from Northern Ireland. Orange had an Orange Town Hall, an Orange Golf course, Orange toilets and other Orange institutions and facilities. I forgot to look see if it had a Garvaghy Road where Orange men and women can parade all day long, blissfully, in the sunshine. (The week before we passed through, Orange had had hailstorms and floods, as had large areas of the interior. The week we left Australia five fire-fighters died in a bush fire in Victoria. Australia has big weather). And then onwards for another seven hours, past rolling hills to the flat, hot bush.
We spent a week or so staying in mainly aboriginal towns and settlements: Weilmoringle, Brewarrina, the mining town of Lightning Ridge. We went to Gadooga, once voted the second most boring town in Oz where, on entering the local Bowling Club for lunch, we watched a fight break out on the adjacent cricket pitch. This didn't seem boring at all. We talked to aborigines about their history, their local sites and their culture, which these days can include Country Music Television off the satellite. We watched boomerangs and other stuff being made. Visited museums. Fished for yabbies in a muddy river and lost all sense of time and space in the vastness of the plains. We saw emus and kangaroos aplenty and slept under the stars (and I didn't snore; Herself is proposing I sleep outside back here in Kildare from now on). We visited the ruins of a mission.
Missions. It was decided somewhere, by someone, that aborigines really ought to be just like white Australians. They should be assimilated. Civilised. To civilise them, civilised society stole their children. Not very civilised. I'll repeat that; it takes a while to sink in. They stole their children. Government agencies, like dog catchers, travelled round picking up aborigine children to place them with white families or put them in church controlled missions. There they did White Studies. English only spoken. What time to take afternoon tea. Cricket, how she is played. Christianity 101. That sort of thing, I expect. This programme helped to wipe out knowledge of local languages, history and customs. It created a whole bunch of people who don't know where they come from, who they are. Some remain to this day cut off from their families. They are known as the Stolen Generation. In the 1960s this policy was abandoned as after decades it still wasn't turning aborigines into Australians and, maybe, because someone in government realised how totally horrendous it was.
These days the government talks of reconciliation. No one seems to be quite sure what this means. One theory is that it means the government wants something sorted out before the Sydney Olympics in 2000 so that the ongoing aborigine question might not be an embarrassment. I asked an aborigine student what it was he wanted. "It would be quite nice," he said, "if someone would say sorry. That would be a start."
Back from the bush we did other stuff. Oz is magical. We overviewed the farm where Babe was filmed. We saw blowholes and koalas, lunched at a place offering "Battered Jews" on the menu ("The Department," said the lady behind the counter, "wants us to change the name of some of our fish . . . " Battered Blacks and Battered Whites were on the menu on other days). We tried to surf and The Irish Times almost lost a cartoonist in the riptide. We watched schools of children, all in their obligatory sun hats, being taught on the beach and thought that this must be the greatest place in the world to bring up children. We ferried around Sydney, viewed the city from atop a revolving restaurant tower and from the Sydney Morning Herald offices (on the 26th floor of the IBM Building . . . how do they work with a view like that?). We went to Canberra, which was a lot nicer than we expected and did the slide show again in the Old Parliament Building. Outside, limousines disgorged blushing brides for their wedding photos, across the road are the wooden huts of the Aborigine Embassy, a protest site.
Oz is a delicate ecology. A while back they introduced European Carp to clean greenery out of the channels in the cotton fields. After floods the European carp got into the river system, cleaned the rivers of all their green stuff that kept the rivers blue and sparkling and got rid of the native fish, too. The rivers are brown and muddy now.
They introduced rabbits who are munching their way through the sub-continent, as we speak. They introduced cows and now they are introducing rape seed to feed the cows. The rape seed has gone native and is now taking over the bush, killing off the local plants, spreading its yellowness all around.
They introduced foxes because they wanted something to hunt. They introduced, in 1770, a bunch of Europeans to a culture that had lived harmoniously with the earth for 50,000 years. Oz is magical. Aborigines have been disappearing ever since.