At the Centre
The way we live, learn and celebrate life in the Centre of Australia.
Roadkill’s ‘bittersweet’ story
Bill Lowe from Land for Wildlife has asked travelling folk to take a slightly closer look at roadkill; while it’s always a sad sight, it can bring good news of a sort. As Bill reported on the Land For Wildlife blog, he received “bittersweet” tidings from Dave Price in the form of a photo of a roadkilled Spectacled Hare-wallaby Lagorchestes conspicillatus he and wife Bess Price had spotted just north of Rabbit Flats on the Tanami Road. Bill reports: Initially they thought it m...Read more
What a knock-out!
I had an unexpected visitor banging on the front door, just after I had reluctantly crawled out of bed. Just one loud knock; who could it be, at 7.30 am, I wondered grumpily. I opened the door with slight trepidation. No sign of the knocker, until I looked down to notice a smudge of grey feathers on our front steps. Trepidation ongoing, I gently scooped the apparently lifeless visitor on to my hand, where it lay on its back, legs in the air. Now I could see much more than shades of grey: an oran...Read more
The missionary times: look again, says Strehlow
It’s not hard to see why John Strehlow chose to put the grandmother he never met at the centre of his epic volume The Tale of Frieda Keyser. If the missionaries of Central Australia have been neglected and undervalued by posterity, their wives have been more so, despite the huge sacrifices they often made for the people of the Centre. As I discovered when I caught up with Strehlow recently, he and his book are imbued with a 21st century mission of their own: to address widely-held assumptions ...Read more
Bush food’s new life in garden
An Aboriginal-owned enterprise near Alice Springs is pioneering the cultivation of one of the world’s most ancient wild foods with help from an unlikely source : a Chinese university. Desert Garden Produce’s Max Emery is anticipating a record harvest of as much as one a half tonnes of kutjera, which will be exported to Melbourne and end as part of the recipe of a mass-produced gourmet sausage. After interviewing Max in 2010 about the Rainbow Valley farm, which is owned and operated by local ...Read more
A man among mangoes
I wonder if I am the only one who can chart the progress of his life through various kinds of mangoes. There were the early years, when we kids were relegated to the bathtub with our share of a case sent down to Brissie from the Tate family sugar cane farm in Ayr, North Queensland. Bowen mangoes, they were called then – none of this Kensington Pride nonsense – an expensive luxury that lasted for a few short days. We lived in a newish suburb garnered from old market far, and local trees were ...Read more
On the boundary lines
Walkey-award winning author of King Brown Country – the betrayal of Papunya, Russell Skelton returns to the history of Papunya for an interesting discussion on the early days of the western desert art movement and the role played by the late Geoff Bardon, in last weekend’s Age newspaper. The story relates to the “the most comprehensive exhibition of early Papunya Tula boards ever staged. Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, at the NGV’s Ian Potter Centre, prese...Read more
Buckley’s chance
As you stock up on your holiday feast supplies this year, imagine a Christmas of such abundance that wherever you walked you were surrounded by fresh fruits from all over the planet, and all in season. The dream is not happening in the crowded aisles of your local supermarket, courtesy of big oil and diesel. It’s right in your own back yard, where ripe or ripening cherries, peaches, apricots, two kinds of apples, grapes, mangoes, bananas, avocadoes and figs are hanging from trees and vines, ju...Read more
Dinner with Miss Pink?
For those not taking part in Alice’s annual summer mass exodus, this report from a trade magazine is offering something completely different for the New Year: Summer nights in Alice Springs will never be the same again now Evenings in Alice has started. “Evenings is Alice is a themed progressive dinner with entertainment based on the history and characters of the town,” said Kathy Graham, the owner of the SEIT Outback Australia, a family owned company specialising in unique tourism exp...Read more
Eclipse will be just in time
A full moon at midnight on a Saturday night in summer in Alice Springs sounds like dangerous combination. Fear not, however; we have a scientific guarantee that any loose lunacy arising will be stamped out for an entire hour – or eclipsed, to put it more precisely. This is our second chance to catch a full lunar eclipse in 20011 and our last to see one at all until 2014, so let’s hope the weather allows us to look for the umbra rather than the umbrella. That’s what astronomers call the ear...Read more
Getting history out of Pandora’s box
Aspects of Alice Springs bring out the historian in people: its isolation, its awe-inspiring centrality, the freshness of cross-cultural contact and the sense that anything could happen. It seems as if you can get a handle on how and why we are the way we are, and amateur historians have always been thick on the ground, ready to argue a point with authorities or each other, often in public. Pat Jackson had the daunting job of keeping the historians happy when she became the first manager of the ...Read more
Beyond market forces
Global money jitters may have dealt a serious blow to the market for art by Australia’s desert painters, but an exhibition drawing big crowds in China is a reminder that the world is unlikely to ever lose interest in high-quality indigenous art. Many of the works in the Warburton collection have the same magnetic magic that was evident in the very first western desert painting from Papunya. It’s easy to understand why the artists elected to hold on to them. Reports Rebecca Thurlow in...Read more
The Tale of Frieda Keysser
John Strehlow’s biography of his grandparents Carl Strehlow and Frieda Keysser is an early Christmas present for lovers of Central Australian history. To be officially launched in Alice Springs next month, The Tale Of Frieda Keysser is an epic yarn centred on the wife of the Hermannsburg missionary and mother of anthropologist Ted Strehow, a story John has been working on since 1994, researching his subjects in dozens of archives in Germany, Australia and the UK). John presents the follo...Read more
Recent Features
- Town camp housing: "We don't want disasters"
- Town camp house faults 'cosmetic'
- Delisted heritage site: "community can have screen".
- Green gong for Parsons Street plan
- Roadkill's 'bittersweet' story
- House-fixing and myth-busting with Paul Pholeros
- Close the grog gap
- Lawyers call for independent probe into death
- What a knock-out!
- Satyasankalpananda Saraswati, 1951-2011
Tags
alice desert festival alice springs alice springs desert festival alison anderson angela-pamela arid lands environment centre bess price budgies Bush Christmas Cake bush food recipes bush foods bush foods competition bush foods recipe bush law bush law documentary bush tomatoes bush tucker central australian history christmas Dick Kimber education environment explorers fiction heritage alice springs high rise History indigenous indigenous affairs john mcdouall stuart justice Nelen race relations rain riots Todd River town planning traditional law Udjerlah's Song uluru violence water wildflowers wild foods yuendumu
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