Behind the Shed

Bush Lemons
Billinudgel
 

Following are the opening paragraphs in Craig’s essay: The Lemon Tree: A Conversation on Civilisation, based on a series of meetings Craig San Roque had with the late Paul Quinlivan:

 

There are places that haunt the mind, strange sites of human settlement, sites of dire conjunction. This place where I live, this house of concrete blocks and concrete floor, this house in Alice Springs, in winter; a refrigerator. In summer, the surrounding sand, the yard, the concrete, all bake in obliterating sun. Out the back, across the fence of corrugated metal you could see claypans and resilient trees, Eucalyptus Coolibah Arida, set amid camouflage grey-blue old man saltbush. It’s long been known as a place where visitors meet. Hidden in the saltbush, Aboriginal men camp at nights, or come for a quiet drink in the hot days. Women come.  The coolibah trees, in the local cultural story, are said to be people dancing, waving in ceremony, welcoming an incoming group of ancestral Yeperenye caterpillar beings. The area is a sacred site, perhaps a Yeperenye fertility site.

Today, women arrayed in loose black skirts and multicoloured tops, swaying, waving, are calling out to family members; “Jungarai, Jungarai, over here.”  Men come to meet them; some shouting hoarsely, some remorseless in their intent, some with beer cans, in party mood, all escaping from the vigilant eyes of police and liquor restrictions. Hidden in the saltbush.

Geese under the bush lemon tree
Source: witcheskitchen
 

In my yard, on this side of the fence, seven citrus trees like seven sisters bearing fruit. One tree, a lemon, suffers from an ailment that has eluded diagnosis and treatment. Between the lemon and the mandarin, a round table; on the table, expecting a guest, I have placed two small coffee cups. I will give the visitor Greek coffee–or Turkish–if this morning, like those who live in disassociated places, he prefers one side over the other. We seem to live, these days, in divided selves. My visitor is one of those who work both sides of divided local ethnic associations. The town of Alice Springs is a “contact zone” where many people, in genetic code or in temperament, occupy a kind of “in-between” position. In this part of Australia the Aboriginal presence is alive and resilient, incorporating and exploiting the resources that come with the white people. The relationship is sometimes symbiotic, interdependent, maybe predatory, and at the same time illuminating, delightful, surprising. There are individuals placed in this region of overlap who can speak the truth of contradictory things; to do so requires a mind capable of holding contradiction. It is the experience of the “in-between” people, the people of the “contact zone”, who I am seeking for this book because I believe it is in difficult places, where racial, cultural groupings grind into each other, that the insidious influence of unconscious pressures felt.

If this were the city, I might seek such impact edges in places frequented by recent immigrants. The restless northern world has poured into Australia countless memories of loss – and countless hopes for a prosperous future. The cities have conquered, and are now developing a mind of their own, but here, in the remote places of indigenous Australia, ambition and a sense of immigrant entitlement continue edging into Aboriginal lands, inducing original peoples to conform to the ambitions of a westernised civilisation – or so it is said. I place my story in the region where the raw edges of Aboriginal mentality and Western mind dominate the scene. If a cultural complex were to surface, it would surface here, in a place of ambivalent contact.

My visitor is part of that hybrid workforce that plays the chess game of white and black interests. I think “chess” because of intricacy, but you could as readily think “poker game” – big money is on the table in government programs, projects, services. All get their cut in this mosaic of Aboriginal territories – in this mosaic of greed.

I am turning your attention to certain people, those whose lives are spent driving thousands of miles (or kilometres, depending upon which measure you  prefer) on remote red-sanded roads, passing through the musical landscapes, entering and leaving the business of remote Aboriginal communities. These are the “border linking” people, some indigenous, some not, whose task it is to work between cultures, in schools, clinics, stores, in Aboriginal art centres, police stations, churches, roadhouses. They translate, mediate, and negotiate; they work to support, teach, tend, facilitate; and they handle drunks, suicides and fights. Some play for personal gain, some labour under the discipline of altruism, some are dedicated to preserving cultural integrity. For some few (both black and white) the reciprocal engagement becomes a vocation, an enterprise of illumination and hardening, a tempering pressed always between the heat and cold of paradoxical states. Here in this region of contact there are signs and symptoms of borderline cultural complexities.

Girl With the Silver Hands
Artist: Claire Partington