Anybody Home?

Remember those great Michener novels, that began not with the birth of the protagonist but with the birth of the land itself? Those novels that read more like a geologic version of the Bible, with “In the beginning…” followed by hundreds of pages of description of volcanoes forming islands rising from the sea or mountain ranges pushed upward by chapters of continents grinding together? If I were to be Michenerian in this Australian blog,  it would be a very long time until I got to this week or two that Bill and I have been doodling around a very small part of this continent/country. Australia is an ancient land, which is evident in its rock formations honed by millennia of natural forces, by its thin top coat of top soil – all that remains after eons of blowing away or washing out to sea, by its peculiar fauna which have evolved in isolation since Gondwana’s  pieces split and inched away from each other 55 million years ago.

Dingo, Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary

Australia is so old that the dingo, which landed on Australia’s shores 5,000 years ago in Asian trading ships, is considered an arriviste and can stir up arguments about whether it’s a native animal. Try not to let the questions that come to mind when learning of Asian traders plying the ocean between Australia and home get in the way: Why didn’t Asians claim other lands as their own, as Europeans did? What did the Aboriginals have to trade, and what did they get from the Asians? And why were the Asians carrying an Asian wolf, which is what the dingoes were, on their ships? Like the Polynesians carrying rats in their canoes, it makes me think the committees deciding what to pack and what to leave behind had unique senses of humor.

The question of who is native and who belongs surfaces again when you look at the human settlement of the continent. Although some scientists say that the Aboriginals have lived on this land for 40 to 60 thousand years, when the British dumped their convicts in Sydney Harbor they declared the land Terra Nullis. Where Americans warred with, then signed bogus treaties with the natives -- or simply handed them smallpox-infected blankets – the British had a simpler answer: just say there’s no one home, then move in. Until the mid-seventies – that’s the mid nineteen 70’s—white Australians took Aboriginal children, especially mixed-race Aboriginal children—away from their families and either adopted them out to white people (who often used them as servants) or shipped them to missions. The plan was to breed the blackness out of the race. The effect was to dislocate a culture to whom the land was life, history, and family. It was only three years ago that Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Stolen Generation. In the 15 years since we last visited Australia, signs have begun to appear in parks and scenic overlooks acknowledging the indigenous populations linked to that land, finally admitting that the terra was not nullis when the convicts came ashore. But we talked with people, on this trip in 2011,  who claimed that the policy of taking children away from their parents resulted in better lives for the children, in that same anecdotal way that Reagan used to use to cloud the issue of the larger effect of government policies. And much like readers of Gone With the Wind will recognize: we too wanted to believe in the happy slave myth to avoid confronting ourselves in the mirror.

GOR between Wye River & Lorne --signs that wouldn't have been here 20 years ago

As we watch the dismantling of the American education system with funding cuts, union breaking, and Texan textbooks, we might take a cautionary tale from Down Under. The people I’ve talked with, aged 35 and up, know more about British history than their own. Cultural cringe was real here until just a few decades ago – even their gardening books were imported from Britain, and everyone accepted they just had to add 6 months to the recommended planting times—so few white Australians knew they had descended from convicts (except for those living in South Australia who proudly, and accurately, proclaimed that they were not) and fewer still knew anything about aboriginal history or government policy toward indigenous people. It is hard to make good public policy based on cultural myth rather than historical fact.

For years Australia wanted only British immigrants – witness the “Ten Pound Pom” policy after WWII, offering ten pound sea tickets to British families relocating to Australia. Was it a way of underlining their invented definition of who had been here long enough to claim the land? And now that Australia has relaxed its immigration policy to grow its economy, the Asians have returned, as have other non-British ethnicities who believe that life would be better here on the fringes of an ancient continent. It’s unclear how long it will take for them to be considered Australian – perhaps less than 5,000 years.

 Koalas on road to Cape Otway Lighthouse, GOR

Not in Kansas

Australia Blog

From being feted with a palatial suite at one quilt conference – it was bigger than my first apartment, and much more expensively furnished – to being put up in volunteer’s homes in rooms that are clearly more storeroom than guest room, the accommodations part of my teaching travels is always a bit of a crap shoot. At this conference in the middle of a national park 3 hours NW of Melbourne, Australia, teachers were stowed in a caravan park in cabins next to camp sites for tents and Winnebagos. The cabins were clean prefab jobs with verandas and full kitchens. I was surprised to find that the single room stated on my contract was a single room in a shared cabin, but how else would I have had the experience of comparing teaching experiences with a Tasmanian roommate?

The conference organizer fed all the teachers breakfast each morning, and I knew I wasn’t in Portland when I encountered an emu and kangaroos foraging for their morning brekkie on my short walk to her cabin. The human Ozzie natives at the breakfast gathering assured me that the monkeys that had woken me up in the morning were not misplaced primates, but their avian sound-alikes, kookaburras. They proved to be my alarm clock for the rest of the week, laughing into my window at 6.45 each morning.

A kangaroo with a joey in her pocket greeted me outside my classroom door on my first teaching morning, to remind me things are different here. So different that my classroom was the poolside rec room in a campground further up the road in the park. No matter where I am, my teaching days usually begin with a half hour of room rearranging, and in this venue I pushed couches around the fireplace for a gathering spot and tables to the windows since the classroom had a total of six light bulbs. From my days of working in the Arts in Education program in Portland schools, where I dyed fabric in bathrooms with kindergarteners, to the odd classroom experience of mixing dyes in a carpeted, upholstered formal dining room of a Caribbean cruise ship, I’ve discovered that problem solving and flexibility are as high on the job description as teaching skills. I’m pretty good at both, as I suspect many women are, but what I’ve learned on the job over the years is when to stop being flexible and demand a better situation for my students. The student stuck in a dim crowded claustrophic corner near the bathroom isn’t going to be a happy camper no matter how well I teach. Since the sun shone during our class, six lightbulbs were sufficient to keep people happily at work. The deep wells of fabric paint a local supplier sent, along with the morning teas of scones and muffins, didn’t hurt either, so flexibility won the day over confrontation.

Bill arrived toward the end of my second class, after a heroic solo drive from the Melbourne airport – undertaken after a 14 hour flight -- and on the left side of the road to boot. He was smart and decided on the option of renting a GPS, and I think the device, quickly dubbed Valerie Victoria, smoothed the way for him. In this second classroom (this time booked in a spacious, albeit equally dim, hotel conference room with a terrifyingly hideous red carpet which no amount of room arranging could obscure) I laid out the map of Australia Bill had bought at the airport, and my class took on the project of helping us to decide which bits of Victoria we would tour after the conference ended. We took on their advice and an additional passenger after they gifted me with a wonderful stuffed wombat named Wally who despite being the burly silent type knew his way around the area. With the help of Wally’s innate geographical knowledge and Valerie’s computer-generated Ozzie accent, we found our way around the Grampian byways that remained open after last month’s floods, then on to the Great Ocean Road. We had a bit of a where-am-I experience as we pulled into our first night’s lodging – in Portland. We are chagrined to admit we were so busy figuring out which direction to head the next morning, we left without the expected photo of two Oregonian Portlanders standing by a Victoria Portland sign.

Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road

Our week of post-class touring gave us views of the Southern Ocean graced by land formations I would love to translate to fabric, encounters with koalas, kangaroos, emus, and wallabies in the wild, vast windfarms, and glimpses of Australian art in a succession of mostly free museums scattered across the state, in big and little towns. Most of all, it gave us slices of other people’s stories: the students who have lived through drought and fire, floods and locusts and were driven to translate those experiences into their artwork, the couple at the breakfast table next to ours in little Port Campbell who called everyone they knew to announce their engagement while waiting for their meals (for those who are interested in these slice of life dramas, he had the ring designed especially for her; I’m guessing he was pretty certain of her answer), the teacher who has started her own yarn supply business and travels to Shanghai and Italy to talk with her manufacturers.

So no matter where I lay my head after class, this strange and accidental career of mine allows me to gather images and stories en route to the (sometime under-lit and dubiously appointed) classrooms filled with interesting women eager to stitch their visions with fabric and thread. I may luxuriate in the times I am housed in one of those resorts with marble lined loos, but even the accommodations that give me tents as neighbors provide me with bonuses like an antipodean morning zoo and verandas looking beyond the campers to the hills and bush of a national park.